Liturgy, History, & Ephrem of Nisibis

The Malankara Syriac Divine Liturgy of St. James,
with its many anaphoras born of the Mother Church of Jerusalem and its Near East missions, provides us with a Holy Qurbana that embodies the spirituality and sacramental life of the Holy Icons. Likewise, the icons reveal the liturgy itself as a recollection & renewal of the catholicity of the Church's Christology.


St. Thomas the Apostle journeyed from Edessa to Kerala, on the SW coast of India, in A.D. 52. Thereafter the Christian faithful of Kerala became known as Thomas Christians. Over time Christian Kerala made its own the East Syriac Malabar liturgy, and later the West Syriac Malankara liturgy.

Our Mission is named St. Ephrem Harp of the Holy Spirit in honor of the great monk & poet of the Syriac Church. Born in 306 in Nisibis — northwest of today’s Mosul, Iraq — St. Ephrem served as a deacon of the Church. He is universally venerated in the East & West as Father & Doctor of the Church.
His liturgical poetry had a formative and lasting influence on Syriac and Greek hymnography, and is still chanted today in Christian Churches East and West.

St. Ephrem Harp of the Holy Spirit
written by the hand of Heather Durka

The scroll held by Mar Ephrem the Archdeacon
is greek script of the deacon's prayers in the Divine Liturgy.

On his monastic vestment
The Great Schema,
signals his ascetical life as a consecrated Monastic.

The titles on either side:
Harp of the Spirit
and
Second Moses to Womankind

More RESOURCES:

Ephrem, wiki

Ephrem, OrthodoxWiki

Ephrem, Hugoye Special Issue 1

A Spiritual Father for the Whole Church: the Universal Appeal of St. Ephraem the Syrian

Keynote Essay by Fr. Sidney H. Griffith
Institute of Christian Oriental Research
at The Catholic University of America, Wash DC, USA

Ephrem, Hugoye Special Issue 2

A Theology of Redemption in the Homilies of St. Ephraim

Jacob of Sarugh named Eprhem "Second Moses to Womankind." In this essay "The Tears of the Sinful Woman":
Hannah M. Hunt, University of Leeds, United Kingdom, writes in conclusion: The distinctive contribution by Ephrem and his school to the exegesis of this text, lies in the reinterpretation of womanhood as a crucial exegetical symbol of redemption.

Ephrem, Hugoye, Brock re Later Syriac Tradition

Ephrem, St. Pachomius Library

Ephrem, the Ephrem Tree in Egypt

Ephrem, The Lenten Prayer

The Paschal Hymn of St. Ephrem

Collection of St. Ephrem at Monachos.net

Scholarly biography of Ephrem the Syrian

excerpt:
To Ephraim pertains the high and unique distinction of having originated -- or at least given its living impulse to -- a new departure in sacred literature; and that, not for his own country merely, but for Christendom.
From him came, if not the first idea, at all events the first successful example, of making song an essential constituent of public worship, and an exponent of theological teaching; and from him it spread and prevailed through the Eastern Churches, and affected even those of the West.
To the Hymns, on which chiefly his fame rests, the Syriac ritual in all its forms owes much of its strength and richness; and to them is largely due the place which Hymnody holds throughout the Church everywhere.
And hence it has come to pass that, in the Church everywhere, he stands as the representative Syrian Father, as the fixed epithet appended to his name attests: "Ephraim the Syrian," the one Syrian known and reverenced in all Christendom.