Greeting from His Eminence, Metropolitan Hilarion
to the Students of Holy Trinity Seminary

Your Eminence! Your Graces!
Distinguished professors and instructors! Dear graduates and students!

On this momentous day for you, the feast of the Three Holy Hierarchs, a day when professors, alumni, and students of Holy Trinity Seminary gather together, I greet you from Australia and prayerfully abide with you within the walls of our beloved Holy Trinity Monastery.

With all my heart, I would like to thank all of you, reverend fathers – our alumni, and the rector, Archimandrite Luke. I thank you for your shared prayers and labors, for your zeal, dedication, and will to serve God’s Church.

We all remember with gratitude our years spent in seminary, our professors, the divine services within the monastery’s prayer-filled churches. Despite any and all hardship, the alumni who have gathered here today have toiled for many years in the field of service to the Church, in the places determined for them by the Church hierarchy, and they believe that the omniscient God will appoint for each of them that which will be of the most use both for their own soul and for the Church, and which will bear the greatest fruit in the vineyard of service to the Church. The Holy Hierarch John Chrysostom wrote truly when he said, "Proximity to God is dependent upon the individual, because God is omnipresent."

I would especially like to address the alumni of the past several years who have received Holy Ordination. The Lord saw fit for you to study at a theological seminary and to stand on the path of service at a time when the world is full of strife, trials, and temptations. You, especially, are in need of God’s aid. Do not forget that the knowledge you have received is but a foundation, a beginning of your further education, which must become an uninterrupted process in your lives. Spend your whole life learning from those who have walked the path of the Christian life – the Holy Fathers. In their works, you will find the answers to how to help those who have come to you with hope and trust – for instruction and comfort. Do not lose the bond you have with your instructors and senior father-concelebrants, be of one mind, quick to understanding, and ready to lend a helping hand.

Once more, I thank God for the opportunity I had to study and teach alongside you, and wish for the dear alumni and current seminarians wisdom, love, patience, and strength in serving God, His Holy Church, and the people.

I call upon you God’s blessing.

+HILARION
Metropolitan of Eastern America & New York
First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad

Media Office of the Eastern American Diocese