Кѷриллъ и Меѳодїи

Today is the sixth Sunday of Pascha, which is known as Blind Man Sunday. On this day we remember Christ's healing of a man blind since birth, as recorded in the Gospel of John. When the Pharisees were interrogating the man afterwards, trying to accuse Jesus of sinning by healing on the Sabbath, the formerly blind man delivered one of the best lines in the entire Bible:
"Whether he is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see."

Those of us whose churches are on the Old Calendar also today celebrate the life and work of two ninth-century Greek monks, Cyril and Methodius [pictured left], who are honored as the Apostles to the Slavs. They are responsible not only for bringing the Gospel of Christ to the people of Eastern Europe, but also for devising a new alphabet for the purpose of transcribing the Scriptures and liturgical texts into the local languages. That alphabet has since become known as the Cyrillic alphabet (after St Cyril), and is currently in use within the Russian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Serbian, Macedonian, Ukranian, Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tovan, and Mongolian languages. Because of the later work of Russian missionaries in North Amercia, some communities of the Yupik, Tlingit, Athabascan, and Aleut cultures also use the Cyrillic alphabet.