(Above) Archdeacon Paisios, the apiarist of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY, participates in the “honey feast” last year.

A reflection on services at the start of the Formation Feast at St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

Tonight at St. John’s we commemorated the eve of the Procession of the Holy Wood of the Life-Giving Cross with an Akathist to the Holy Cross, followed by the Lesser Blessing of the Waters, and the Blessing of the Honey.

This eve of the start of the Dormition Feast marks also the “Honey Feast” or “Honey Spas,” a mini-feast dedicated to our Lord Jesus Christ’s Cross, and embedded in the Dormition Season.

Because of the joyful sorrow running through this season, the Dormition Fast is not labeled Summer Lent; that title belongs to the Apostles Fast–and truly to savor both and the distinction between what each bring to the summer Church, you need to be on the actual Church calendar, as is our parish, glory to God! (For the Apostles Fast usually practically disappears on the modern secular calendar used by a minority of Orthodox Christians who follow the established secular time of the modern West.)

This season of the “Summer Pascha” of the Dormition, the falling-asleep of the Most Holy Mother of God, in Orthodoxy is a time of bridging this world and the next. In Orthodox Christianity, unlike modern Catholicism, the Virgin Mary is regarded as fully human, and the greatest of all saints. Her departure from the earth involves Jesus taking her soul up to heaven, followed by the taking up of her body, so that she becomes first to be in the Kingdom of Heaven resurrected. This is a great source of our own hope when we call upon her to pray for us and intercede with her Son, as she did paradigmatically at the Wedding of Cana in the Gospels.

We are nearing the end of the year on the traditional Orthodox Christian calendar, heading toward the new year of 7535 on Sept. 1 (Sept. 14 on the civil calendar). And this time of “high summer” is a time of thanksgiving for harvests along with commemorating the departure of the Theotokos, who in her repose and passing becomes our intercessor in Heaven with her Son, even as the fruit-bearing Church comes to harvest.

So many rich layers in our Church Tradition: Today is also called the Feast of the All-Merciful Saviour and His Most Holy Mother, and commemorates the victories under the Cross of Byzantine and Russian armies defending their Christian communities against Muslim invaders in the Middle Ages in what to the West are forgotten shadow wars that defended it too, as did the Seven Maccabean heroes from Scripture whom we also commemorate today. As the American ROCOR Priest Sergei Sveshnikov has noted, the feast has living significance not just historical: “We rejoice in the living God, Who continues to bless and sanctify the labors of all who devote their lives to Him. Whether you are a missionary or an emperor, a monastic or a person who lives in the world, a beekeeper or a gardener, a computer programmer or an auto mechanic—when you labor for the glory of God, He accepts the fruits of your labors, blesses them, and sanctifies them.” https://frsergei.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/the-feast-of-the-all-merciful-saviour/

We give glory on this “Honey Feast” for first and foremost the Holy Wood of the Tree of the Cross, and then also bless the waters of Creation in a small local way (the “lesser blessing”), and the honey that is the fruit of the industrious bees whom we are called on to emulate. Soon, next week, at the Feast of Transfiguration, the “Apple Feast,” we will bless fruit. Then at the Feast of the Dormition Feast soon after will come the blessing of flowers. And the day after the Dormition, the “Nut Feast,” blessing nuts.

Holy Wood, the waters, honey, fruits, flowers, nuts, and strength for spiritual victories over what would erase the endless story of God in our lives. We rejoice in God’s gifts in the cycle of earthly life and from His heavenly Kingdom in the Church, in the gift economy of Creation. It is based on our relationship first with Him and then also from that with one another, in sobornost, the mystical solidarity of the one truly catholic Church of our Lord, the Orthodox Church. So this is the original Christian Thanksgiving season, preceding by a millennium and more even the old American Thanksgiving, and even deeper and spiritually richer. It is also a special season of repentance, a time for the mystery of Confession in the Church preceding the two major Feasts of the Church hidden in her folds so to speak this summer-time of year.

We rejoice in the final flowering of summer, asthe healing Paraklesis services of this season proclaim in the Unwedded Bride and Most Holy Mother of God, our Lady the Theotokos and Virgin Mary, who is the Mother of us all, and the exemplum of the Church as our Mother, whom we know in Holy Tradition to have had such an important influence on the founding era of her Son’s Church. Heading into the new year, and the evening of the year, we will look soon in the gathering winter darkness toward the morning star of the birth of her Son, from her womb that in utmost mystery contained the Creator of the World, and thus enabled the emergence of the Church as the Body of Christ. And we rejoice in all the gifts that God gives to us, starting with His Son, through her.