Saturday Synaxis

Our God, may we lay hold of thy cross, as of a staff that can stand unshaken when the floods run high. It is this world and not another, this world with all its miseries - its ruin and its sin - that thou hast entered to redeem by thine agony and bloody sweat [...] O holy, merciful, all-forgiving redeemer, teach us more worthily to repent of the terror and horror of our fall, by the memory of that innocent gladness with which we should have gone with thee to the altar of God, to offer there [...] the unshrinking homage of a spotless heart! Amen.

- Henry Scott Holland