The Orthodox Church today commemorates the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos, her falling sleep, her complete humanity yet her complete exemplification of theosis in her passing. This differs from the heterodox Western view of the Virgin Mary as having had both a birth and a death that were emphasized as beyond the regular human. Orthodoxy emphasizes both her humanity and again her exemplification of theosis, through the complete Orthodox Christian teaching of the uncreated energies, of salvation as synergy, and of the fullness of the Holy Trinity. With this comes a deeper understanding of her identification with the Church;
–First, in the Incarnation of Christ, she contained within her womb the human nature of the Logos Who unites in one person His divine and human natures, fully God and fully man. So, it can be said that she gave birth in that understanding to God the Creator Who was contained in her womb and Whom she nursed.
–Yet our Lord also said that who does His will is His mother, and brother, and family, indicating the identification of her who is prefigured by the Old Testament Tabernacle as the dwelling place of God, with His Church, the fulfillment of Israel. Indeed, the Orthodox Church in two major feasts of the Theotokos in addition to the Dormition celebrates her Entry into the Temple as a young girl of 3, and then at the Presentation of Christ in the Temple when she was 14, celebrates Our Lady’s intimate relation with the Temple of God, which she in effect replaced or superseded through giving birth to our Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, the Second post-exilic physical Temple that had been the center of continued Old Testament worship was destroyed as prophesied in AD 70 following a revolt against the Romans by those Jews who rejected Christ by following a false idol of Jewish nationalism rather than the Church.
–Finally, we see her nurturing of the Church in its first two decades or so, as a central figure of wisdom and continuing intercession for the Apostles and earliest Christians, even according to tradition for a time being in EphesUs with the Apostle John before returning to the Mount of Olives where she so memorably fell asleep in the Lord. She exemplified theosis in becoming one with the uncreated energies of God, or grace, as taught fully and experienceable fully only within the Orthodox Church that is the historic and ongoing spiritual Body of Christ.
When the Church is described as the Bride of Christ in Scripture and Tradition, this also bears relation to how our Lady is termed in the hymns of the Church the unwedded or virgin Bride of God, in giving birth to our Lord. She is in a mystical way both Bride of God in the sense of Jesus being Incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and becoming Man, as the Creed tells us, and the Mother of God, in providing the fleshly nature of Jesus’ human body. It was as fully God and fully Man, in His human body, that our Lord ascended into heaven and sits at the Right Hand of the Father. So, our Lady in both aspects of this unified mystery becomes inseparably identified with our Lord’s Church, His Body, through which we receive His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.
It is thus proper that the Church year draws to an end after this Dormition season, and then begins again with her first major feast of the new year being the birth of the Theotokos (and right at the end of the year, within two weeks, the Feast of the Beheading of the Forerunner John reminds us of the end of the last Old Testament Prophet and his evangelizing for the New in Hades, and the joyful sorrow of Christian faith).
Tomorrow we will mark the final Spas or feast of our Savior of the Dormition season, still in the after feast of the Dormition, which honors the Icon of our Lord not made with hands. It is also the Nut Feast featuring the blessing of nuts, the last of the harvest feasts marked in the Slavic Orthodox lands that continued Byzantine Tradition in what is sometimes called the Third Rome.
This final harvest feast is appropriate also because of the continuation of the iconographic traditions starting with that of our Lord seen in the Icon Made without Hands. There we also see the continuity of the Church as the Body of Christ with all that occurred in His earthly life. The Church identified with our Mother is not lost or invisible or existent in branches or dualism, rather she is as the Creed states one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, to which we are dedicated.
So this Dormition season prepares us to go forth into the new Church year, in the evening of the year, the evening and the morning being the day, with the light of Pascha and the Resurrection of Christ again on the Horizon beyond His Nativity in which the darkness of winter begins to lighten, and the calm and rest of evening given us by God as a special time of prayer readying us for the new year. We have had this Dormition season the blessing of the honey at the Feast of the Procession of the Holy Wood at the beginning, the blessing of the fruits at the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord, the blessing of herbs and flowers today at the Feast of the Dormition of our Lady, and the blessing of the nuts tomorrow at the Feast of the Mandylion.
The blessing of honey, fruit, herbs and flowers, and nuts all involve the tangible recognition in Church Tradition of the blessed gifts given to us every day by God, of how Divine Providence through the uncreated energies of God sustain us through His Church, His Body, inseparably linked with the nurturing care and intercessions of our Holy Mother the Theotokos. Just as All Saints Day in the Orthodox Church anciently precedes and spiritually towers over what has become the commercialized and re-paganized Halloween in the West, so too the ancient season of Orthodox Christian Thanksgiving in which we are now in precedes and enriches the American understanding of the secular Thanksgiving Day later in the year.
The Holy Martyr Priest Alexander Mramornov of Russia was martyred in 1918 by the Christ-hating Bolsheviks, but the words of a sermon he gave recorded in 1909 remain treasured by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, today preserved on her website. Let us attend to the Holy Martyr’s words. Let us in conclusion hear his words on the Feast.
The Most-Holy Virgin, the Mother of God, lived for some fifteen or twenty years following the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ into Heaven. During this time, she was as a wanderer fervently wishing to return to her homeland, preparing herself for the heavenly abode. And finally the day came, and she paid the debt to her physical nature, death.
For three days before her blessed end, amid burning prayer on the Mount of Olives, Archangel Gabriel announced to her that she would make the final passage, and gave her a frond from heaven. The Heavenly Queen, the Mother of God, was not confounded, she did not fear for her moment of death, and joyously took to her deathbed. In response to her wish, the Holy Apostles were miraculously gathered at her deathbed to pay their last respects at her funeral. On August 15, at three o’clock in the afternoon, when the Most Holy Virgin Mary lay on her deathbed awaiting her end, and suddenly the light of Divine glory shone forth, and all the candles burning in her home were extinguished. The Apostles and others in attendance were astounded by what they saw.
The roof of the house seemed to disappear, and Jesus Christ Himself descended into the room, surrounded by angels, the Holy Fathers and Prophets, and approached His Mother. Seeing Her Son, the Holy Mother was overjoyed; rising from her deathbed, she bowed before Him and peacefully and painlessly left this earth, entrusting her Most-Pure soul to Her Son and Her God. It was as though she had not died, but only fell into a deep sleep, because in 2-3 days she rose to eternal life.
For the Most-Holy Mother of God, death was simply a passage into another existence, the beginning of a new, blessed life, when she entered into constant communion with God and her glory then shone forth with Divine miracles (the second sticheron on “Lord I have cried…”).
From the story of the Dormition of the Mother of God we see how peacefully, painlessly, how happily our Queen, the Most-Holy Mother of God presented herself to God. This was a truly Christian death, which is so sweet for the pure soul, for it is nothing more than moving from this sinful world to the joy of eternal heaven. The Most-Merciful Lord will send to each righteous person His holy Angels upon death, as we know from the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The righteous do not die, but like lifelong travelers return home for eternal rest. Let us remember the death of Prophet Jacob: his children surrounded his bed, and he blessed each one of them, then lay down and painlessly passed into the other world, to the better, heavenly world. And this was during the Old Testament, before death was trampled by the death of Christ.
In the New Testament, “death was put to death, and we were given life,” so the true Christian does not die so much as falls asleep. “Children,” said St John the Theologian to his followers, “dig me a grave!” He entered the grave and gave his soul over to God. Sensing his impending death, St Dimitry of Rostov summoned choir singers and had them sing several favorite church prayers; then, dismissing everyone, he sank to his knees before an icon of the Savior and died. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.” All the martyrs and ascetics proved this truth in life and in death. Some of them preserved constant prayer and kneeling, redeeming their peaceful souls. Others were burned alive, or faced the executioner’s blade—but with joyful faces, praising Christ the Lord and rejoicing at their speedily approaching unification with Him. In our daily lives we also witness the good Christian deaths of the righteous.
As death approaches a person who lived and tended to his soul, he senses the proximity of the end, but is convinced that by the will of the Merciful Father in Heaven, it is unavoidable, and ponders it in peace. True, he sympathizes with his friends and relatives, for he has loved them, and separation is difficult, but he believes that there, beyond the grave, in the land of the living, he will once again meet them. His body may ache, but such sufferings are mitigated by the knowledge that this ancient temple of his body must be destroyed in order for the soul it harbors to rush to the One Who is the Source of eternal life. By genuine repentance they cleanse their sinful wounds. The servant of God, a pastor of the Church, a spiritual father carries with him the deposit towards eternal life—the Holy Mysteries—he administers Holy Communion, he pours quiet joy into the soul of the righteous, the foretaste of eternal life. And in the moment of mysterious death, the icy breath covers the face of the dying, but without any doubt, the Merciful gaze of the Savior will open for him the Kingdom of Eternity, and his Guardian Angel stands at the deathbed in order to take the believing and loving soul and escort it to the heavenly abodes.
Yet this is not the death of the sinner. Even in luxurious mansions, within elegantly-appointed chambers, he dies a horrible death. In this terrifying moment of death, the wicked demons surround his deathbed, and with all the demonic power of their impatience for the soul to depart the body, they seize it to drag into the darkness of Hades. His conscience will awaken, but it will be too late. He will see that his reliance in his treasures will have been in vain.
His riches will be left behind on earth, and he will depart for the other world to the Righteous and Virtuous Judge. His pleasures had held him captive, but the time now comes when pleasures are exchanged for agonies. He sees that his entire life was a great mistake, that “I have profaned my soul with shameful sins and have wasted my life in laziness.” For the sinner, the agony of Hades sometimes already begins on earth. The Word of God and the history of the Church have preserved for us several horrifying examples: Herod, the murderer of the Infants of Bethlehem, was eaten alive by worms. Judas the Betrayer and Arius the Heretic died degrading deaths. When you read about this, you cannot but fear for yourself. For these people were once good: Judas was an Apostle, and so among the finest of men. Arius was a scholar and a pious man in his own right. Herod was a wise man: he was called “the Great” for good reason. But this is what sin does to man, and this is the bitterness of the death of a sinner.
Most-Holy Queen, Mother of God, you in your honorable Dormition stood before the very Throne of the Omnipotent. Beseech your Son that He gives us living on earth the strength and endurance to fervently seek Heaven, as did you; may He then allow us a peaceful Christian death, and upon arrival in the world on high, grant us consolation and endless holy joys which you enjoy in the Kingdom of His Glory.