On Sunday, June 24, 2012, the Cathedral held its “Three-fold Commemoration” as it does on the last Sunday each June: 1) the Saintly Prince Lazar’s choice of the heavenly kingdom over the earthly one; 2) the Cathedral benefactors who have established endowments to support Cathedral ministries in both the present and future; 3) the Women’s Auxiliary Slava, Saint Anastasia of Serbia.  Our special guest was His Eminence, Metropolitan Nikitas, the Director of the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute in Berkeley, California.  He celebrated the Divine Liturgy with Fr. Nicholas Ceko and Fr. Norman Kosanovich, blessed and cut the Kolach for the Women’s Auxiliary Slava and offered an inspiring address to everyone in attendance at the banquet.  A theme Metropolitan Nikitas touched on, as it relates not only to Serbians in the wake of the Battle of Kosovo and their suffering in the centuries that followed but also to the Metropolitan and his Greek ancestors who also suffered under the Turkish yoke, was to not remain in bitterness about the past but rather to have hope in the future through a life lived in imitation of the martyrs who never stopped witnessing the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when it exacted the ultimate cost in this world – their existence – because of the promise of eternal existence in the heavenly kingdom of God.