Father Archdeacon Paisios at the blessing of water and honey at Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville NY, Aug. 1, 7532 (Aug. 14, 2024 on the civil calendar).

What has happened to us as Orthodox Christians, as we have fallen into the season of the Dormition of the Theotokos on the late-summer Church calendar, the falling asleep of the Mother of God? We are in a wondrous time. The end of this season, the Dormition Feast, Aug. 28 on the civil calendar, is known as Summer Pascha. The dormition or falling-asleep of the Mother of God is depicted as a gathering of the Holy Apostles including Paul, and Jesus Christ taking her soul into heaven directly so that she would not go through the trials of particular judgment facing humanity. Later, at the prompting of the tardy Thomas the Believing, her tomb is examined and her body is found gone, apparently translated. The Virgin Mary dies as humans die, while taken to be with her Son, also the Son of God, to be intercessor for all of us. Throughout this season we ask especially hard for her intercession, including the beautiful and joyful Paraklesis service, which we will hold again Wednesday.

Summer Pascha is not usually termed as accompanied by Summer Lent, a term used for the Apostles Fast earlier. Instead, this short season could be considered Orthodox Thanksgiving, anticipating autumn right before the beginning of the Church year on Sept. 1 (Sept. 14 on the civil calendar). The Church calendar emphasizes the intercessory presence of the Mother of God and the uncreated energies shown on earth from our Lord with fruits of the earth as gifts from a loving God. The blessing of fruits, the Apple Feast, will be performed tomorrow, and at the beginning of the fast this past week was the so-called Honey Feast, and in the After-feast will be the Nut Feast. That the term of Lent is not commonly used for the short Dormition Fast suggests the bright sorrow at the peaceful passing of the Mother of God, our intercessor and help.

Commemorations this season relate to dedicating the first fruits to God, back to Old Testament times. The Honey Feast at the start of the Fast is known as the First Saviour Day of three associated with the Dormition season, and also commemorates the Life-Giving Cross of the Lord. The Apple Feast tomorrow is considered the start of autumn in East Slavic tradition. Flowers and herbs are blessed at Dormition Feast. The Nut Feast on the day after Dormition involves the blessing of nuts and also commemorates the image of Jesus Christ “not made with hands” on a cloth, a reminder of the physicality of our iconography. The first of the trio of holidays is also associated with the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God appealed to in victories on the same day in different parts of the Orthodox world over enemies, which led to establishment of the Procession of the Holy Cross on what is also the day of the conversion of Holy ‘Rus too, again on the beginning of the Dormition Fast.

On that day this past week, early in the morning at Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville, NY, at the source of the Susquehanna watershed of which our local parish in central Pennsylvania is a part, following Divine Liturgy, Bishop Luke and clergy and monastics and laity went to bless honey at the monastery apiary, tended by Archdeacon Paisios. The apiary there has been a source of inspiration for hopes that our mission, also in Northern Appalachia but further south, can in future maintain beehives on our six-acre property, which includes our new temple and a cemetery. The project to include a garden and beehives has been called the “Garden of the Theotokos,” dedicated to the Holy Mother. For now, after our Paraklesis service to the Theotokos for the start of the Dormition Fast, we humbly blessed two jars of honey brought by a couple of our families. This year marked the first Paraklesis and first blessing of honey at our mission, fittingly as we complete soon, God willing, our temple.

The Honey Feast at the start of the Dormition season is also a day traditionally for blessing water and particularly wells. So, at our new almost-finished temple I said the short prayers to bless the well on Wednesday. It is under a metal well head right by a corner of the gravel parking lot, apart from the temple building across a short lawn. Within several feet is the boundary of our neighbor’s farmland where the corn is high. So it wouldn’t appear an open well or spring as often seen at the ancient holy wells in Ireland from early (Orthodox) days there. Those wells are being documented in articles online currently by the Irish Orthodox author Paul Kingsnorth. In fact, he will be visiting our mission town to speak on nature and Christianity the end of October. But I did have even from my short experience in censing our well, and dousing it with holy water, and saying prayers aloud to the wind, a sense of our experience as Orthodox Christians in the Church as not being alone, but being related to the gifts of God in Creation, and to God Himself, through the the Body and Blood of Christ to be honored at the Eucharist soon in our adjoining temple, God willing. Deep are the waters of God running through Creation, to which the uncreated energies of the Transfiguration are likened. Many are His wonders that leaven and sustain us unseen.

This is the wonderful thing about the Church. In an age falling to loneliness and anxiety, she gives so many opportunities for unexpected connectedness of all types throughout the year. Alexander Dugin, an Old Believer Russian Orthodox philosopher, writes of this season that the Orthodox Church shows forth “a living, sacred cosmos, elevating and transforming it (rather than erasing it, as in Western European Christianity)… figures, stories, dogmas, and concepts of Christian tradition were projected… into the very flesh of the everyday reality, into the structures of everyday experience. In this way, the dematerialization of reality occurred, raising it into subtle spheres of light where earth met heaven, time met eternity, and creation met the Creator… ‘The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed,’ wrote the Apostle Paul for all Christians.” We see this not only in Russian forest hermitages, but in desert monasteries of the Byzantine East, and among island-dwelling saints of the Irish Sea. We’ll see this illustrated in indigenous Orthodox North America in the film Sacred Alaska soon at the Campus Theatre.

Dugin wrote that “… honey, wood, water, animals, nuts, apples, birds, fish, cabbage, iron, fire, and all the rest — also long for salvation from the claws of distorted, devil-poisoned (by the temporary prince of this world) matter. They await Christ. When He comes and accomplishes the great work of salvation, they cling to those who have followed Christ, like domestic animals — gently and faithfully. The Savior saves the bees, honey, apples… ” How so many long for such meaningful community on earth and lack it. How we have this gift to share in our Church. With the Cross comes the honey. The tradition of the Wood of the Cross commemorated this season is shown in a beautiful mural at Agia Skepi monastery in White Haven. It shows the tradition of Lot tending the growth of the three types of trees entwined together as the Tree of the Cross, cedar, pine, and cypress. Raised from seeds from the skull of Adam, given to Seth from Paradise, the entwined trees can be seen as symbolizing the three-in-one Holy Trinity, reflecting Isaiah’s words, “The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the [cedar] tree, the pine tree, and the [cypress] together to beautify the place of my sanctuary, and I will make the place of my feet glorious.” This refers to the footrest on the Russian Orthodox Cross. That footrest points upwards on one side for the Wise Thief who recognized the hidden God on the Cross, and down on the other to indicate the Foolish Thief who rejected Jesus. This sums up the hope of our faith.

On our own land, we have blessed two standing wooden Crosses. The one for our building site is made of hemlock, one of the types of wood most prevalent historically in the old-growth forests her. The other, at our Orthodox cemetery, came from an abandoned Orthodox Church in the coal region, in Shepton, Pennsylvania, where the Patriarch-Confessor Tikhon once served. It connects us with the earlier history of Orthodoxy in the Pennsylvania mountains as the other connects us with the forests here Together they extend their arms openly to our mission’s work amid wooded and agricultural rolling ridges, reminiscent in our Northern Appalachian community on a small scale of the region of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which end not far south of us in Carlisle.

A wonderful event associated with the Dormition Season is the appearance of snakes on the island of Kefalonia in Greece at this time, on an island featuring chapels dedicated to the Dormition. Snakes with crosses on their heads, said to be health-bearing, come out of the ground. Even snakes in Dormition season testify to how the Mother of God, and the Church identified with her, through her Son, is victor over the serpent that deceived Eve. Just so the Woman in Revelation giving birth to the child symbolizes the Church and those baptized in Christ eluding the Dragon, Satan, which is slain. “And the earth helped the woman,” we are told.

In these feasts of blessing, honey, apples, and nuts, of Holy Wood, flowers, and herbs, in Dormition Season including the Feast of the Transfiguration, we see ancient living grace endure and renew us in the Church calendar and as creatures on God’s earth. We experience the promise of Paradise restored through God’s saving grace, amid these ridges of Northern Appalachia, in the heartland of the Susquehanna Valley. It is good to remind ourselves that our calendar itself, the Julian calendar, is that in which this American land was originally framed as a country, the old Appalachian calendar. That we restore even it in our Church today is a sign hopefully that as the Elder Paisios reportedly said, “One day America will be holy,” and the countryside around us may feature many Orthodox domes and crosses, until our Lord Jesus comes. May our Lady the Most Holy Theotokos through her prayers renew our baptism vows during this Dormition season. In the Church of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, may we find relationship with Him and all Creation, losing ourself in Him, to find ourselves and one another. We begin right here and now in central Pennsylvania with feasts of honey, apples, nuts, flowers, herbs, water, and the wood of the Cross, commemorating the beautiful Transfiguration of our Lord and God in Creation, and the falling-asleep of the Most Holy Theotokos to become Mother of us all.