What a wonderful confluence of worship and veneration and life in Christ we dwell in today at Church, or rather in a sense we swim in, at this gateway to Summer Lent, and, on the horizon, Summer Pascha, in the Season of the Dormition of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos.
In her honor we begin the Dormition Fast today, a time for summer spiritual deep-cleaning, for cleansing and detoxing spiritually so to speak, before the oncoming arrival of the new year of the Church in September together with the school year and the duties of the fall and cooler weather.
Indeed, we already have with us today, following the Liturgy, the first of the summer-harvest blessings of the Church calendar, the blessing of honey, which is why today is also known as the Honey Feast. It is also a day of special blessing for wells in the depth of summer, and it was a year ago today that prayers of blessing were said for our well on this property prior to the completion of our new Temple a few months later, glory to God!
Significantly, we commemorate today both the Procession of the Holy Cross historically around the city of Constantinople dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and the Seven Maccabean Martyrs including their mother Solomonia, who chose martyrdom even before the coming of Christ for their faith. Asked to go against the laws of God as understood in their time, in the second century B.C., they stood by their faith and the hope of resurrection in God.
As the Synaxarion puts it echoing St. Gregory the Theologian, “In fact, although their witness had been before the coming of Christ, these holy martyrs are in no way less than those who followed the Lord, imitating His life-giving Passion; for it is faith in Christ, who, already living in them through the hope of resurrection, made them triumph over all that held them to the earth.”
In the words of the old American Gospel song, “they would not bend, they would not bow, they would not yield.”
And the mother Solomonia, in a type of the Virgin Mother, put her faith in God beyond even her worldly love as a mother, in supporting her seven sons in martyrdom with their teacher Eleazar, and joining them in their witness to the faith. Together they all showed forth the true heritage of the Jews that led many to follow Christ and form His Church, as opposed to the false Judaism and Judaizing that rejected Christ for worldly power. They stood up against the anti-Christian Hellenism of the tyrant Antiochus IV of the Alexandrine kingdom of Syria, and his pagan philosophy. This is a lesson also for those of us Christians today. The martyrs said, as Second Maccabees tells us, “We are ready to die rather than to transgress the laws of our fathers.” One of the sons, lacerated with nails and stretched out on a catapult, told his torturers: “Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for His Laws, unto everlasting life.” The mother Solomonia encouraged her sons’ martyrdom and gave herself also, saying: “I cannot tell how ye came into my womb, for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it I that formed the members of everyone of you: but doubltess the Creator of the world, who formed the generation of man, nad found out the beginnings of all things, will also of His own mercy give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for His Law’s sake.”
All this is missed by the Protestants who leave this ancient biblical book out of their Bibles today, by the way.
The mother Solomonia, foreshadowing in typology the Theotokos, expressed that philotimo that is the heart of manliness, whether in men or women. Philotimo, a Greek word meaning love of honor, has the Orthodox Christian meaning of the spontaneous, self-sacrificing love shown by humble people, from whom every trace of self has been filtered out, full of gratitude towards God and their fellow man. Philotimo comes from a deep, abiding connection with God, so that one is constantly moved to do and seek that which is good, right and honorable. That definition is from Father Demetrios Carellas based on the Church Fathers.
Such self-sacrificial heroism is exemplified most of all on the Cross. When Orthodox Christianity came to the pagan Germanic tribes, the Anglo-Saxons wrote a poem called The Dream of the Rood, or Dream of the Cross, in which Jesus leapt on the Cross like a warrior hero, with the Tree of the Cross as a symbol of victory. Yet also as our hymns for Matins noted last night, our Mother the Theotokos planted that life-giving Tree of victory.
The power or virtue of the Cross of which we sing in today’s Troparion was evident in how it was carried in procession around Constantinople in ancient times. The relic of the Precious Cross was taken from the imperial palace and carried to the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in a great procession, stopping first at the small Baptistry for the Blessing of the Waters. The linking of the waters to our holiday today also relates to baptism and the Water of Life given us by Jesus Christ, which nourishes the Tree of the Cross for our salvation.
The procession then placed the Cross on the Holy Table of Saint Sophia’s, as it was placed on that of our humble mission last night at Vespers. From the Great Church they circled the city quarter by quarter until the eve of the Dormition Feast, to purify the air and protect the city, from epidemics common in the summer there and also from enemies visible and invisible.
But Constantinople, which was the seat of the world’s major Christian country for more than 1,000 years, did not last forever. The protection afforded by the Theotokos to the city dedicated to her depended on the faithfulness of her people. When the leaders, like those of Judah in the Old Testament, became corrupt and idolatrous, and finally when many of the leaders at the end adopted Catholicism in an effort to forge a political alliance with Western powers, Constantinople fell to the Muslims, and is now Istanbul.
But the Mother of God interceding for the faithful with her Son did not abandon the Orthodox Christians any more than did our Lord. The Third Rome was waiting in the shadows, and the honoring of the Mother of God in the Dormition Fast and Summer Pascha, including the feasts of our Savior such as today, became a part of Russian spiritual life as well as cultural folk life, hidden in the summertime of northern forestlands. May it be so also among the woods and fields and mountain ridges here of central Pennsylvania in northern Appalachia.
The blessing of the honey and lesser blessing of the waters today remind us of the sustaining Providence of God in our rural region also. St. Basil the Great said that Orthodox Christians should gather nectar from the flowers of the world to make honey, and the sustenance and beauty of both the flowers and the honey is one of the physical gifts from God that also signify His spiritual gifts. God’s Providence or nurturing is figured for us in the Theotokos. And we here today in our mission can remember in this 250th anniversary of America that “Divine Providence” is one of the mentions of God even in our American Declaration of Independence. Providence there is a term that indicates something more is meant than merely Enlightenment Deism and impersonal Unitarianism as a basis for our country to fulfill.
At this time of this feast we have a meeting in Alaska between the leaders of Russia and America. May the Cross sustain the spirit of Holy Rus’ in Russia and Ukraine in peace against the spiritual threats against her, and likewise move the Christian culture of America from heterodox to the Orthodox Church, in which lies her salvation. May we all realize throughout the world the protecting intercession of our Most Holy Mother, the Theotokos, in this season of the Dormition, which leads us to the finale of the Church Year in her example of love for us all through her Son our Lord.
Most Holy Theotokos save us!