Your All-Holiness, Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, beloved Fathers and brothers in Christ,
On this radiant and holy day of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, I stand before you with profound gratitude and reverence. Your All-Holiness, I thank you from the depths of my heart for the extraordinary grace bestowed upon me today through my ordination to the Holy Diaconate.
It is an undeserved and awe-inspiring gift of God, granted through your paternal hands. For my wife and me, this is truly a dream come true. I receive it with humility, conscious of my unworthiness, and with firm resolve to serve faithfully at the Holy Altar, in obedience to Christ and His Holy Church.
Allow me also to say, Your All-Holiness, that in Lithuania we deeply feel your fatherly care and protection. We do not experience ourselves as a distant community in the North, but as living members of the family of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. When your encyclicals and patriarchal letters are read in our parishes, they are received personally — as the loving guidance of a father addressing his children. They console us, teach us, and strengthen us.
And now, this ordination of mine here, at the very heart of our Patriarchate, is yet another visible sign of your pastoral concern and love for our community. It strengthens our hope and confirms that the Mother Church walks with us.
We await with great spiritual anticipation your forthcoming visit to Lithuania in June. That visit will be for us a moment of grace and historic joy — a blessing for our clergy and faithful alike.
Your All-Holiness, thank you once more from the bottom of my heart for this sacred trust. Please pray for me and my family, that I may serve worthily, faithfully, and humbly.
And I also would like to wish you happy birthday and many, many years.
Εἰς πολλά έτη, Δέσποτα!
