Today we celebrate St. George the Victor, but it is also a day that affords an opportunity to look inside our own selves – whether we are ready to defend our principles, whether we are brave enough to state them out loud and uphold them.

A young warrior defeats Emperor Diocletian, though not with weapons, but with martyrdom, sacrificing his life for his God. At first glance, St George had everything we, in the modern world, aspire for – position in life, respect, wealth. But he cast them aside in the search for truth, the truth that Christ resurrected is the way, the truth and the love in which we trust.

“Willingness to make sacrifices is the key to many things we can do in our lives,” says Dr. Zlatina Karavulcheva from the “Dveri” educational initiatives centre. “It is no secret that nowadays we try to achieve as much as we can at the lowest possible cost. But we can achieve nothing – that is something we see in the life of any saint - if the feeling is lacking that the cause we believe in is worth making a serious sacrifice for. And it shall all be come to nothing unless one feels the pain of having sacrificed something for one’s ideal.”

St. George had a personal encounter with God, that is why he stood up for the truth so forcefully, even when he was tortured for it. Today God wouldn’t want such a thing of us. Yet the least we could do is ask ourselves: What is worth disturbing our comfort for?

“We each have something that has pricked our conscience, something that has pained us, something that haunts our thoughts,” Zlatina Karavulcheva says. “And if there is something lodged so deeply in our conscience, such as injustice towards our loved ones or our nation, then we should not just live with it so as not to stir up our conscience. When there is injustice being done around us, this quelled conscience turns into a time bomb and, sooner or later, explodes inside us. That is the most important conclusion we can draw – that we must not silence our conscience, that we must find the strength to conquer fear.”

The truth is that we are often afraid to lend a helping hand to those who suffer innocently, to those who have been wronged. We prefer to write how indignant we are on social media instead of leaving our comfort zone and making an effort – and it sometimes takes temerity to help someone.

“When societies are not living in critical times people tend to get comfortable and sink into their prosaic problems,” Zlatina Karavulcheva says. “If historical time gets compressed, however, then it becomes apparent who has been building over the time when society did not have to face any critical choices – of persecution, war or some other kind of ordeal. The epidemic we are now experiencing is just such an ordeal in which many things come to light, and in the way we each withstand the hardships, we see the small victories we have each had in the times that have been quieter. But if we are not heroes in our everyday lives, if we have not achieved our small victories in the battle with our own selves, then with our selfishness we shall never be victorious in the big battle of life.”

Photos: BGNES and Diana Tsankova