(Above) Archdeacon Paisios prepares for the blessing of the honey at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY.
Gratitude is a way of life that is healing, and it is also a key aspect of being a Christian.
As Orthodox Christians we take that further. Knowing that our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the Way, as well as the Truth, and the Life, and that the Church is His Body, we can say that our gratitude is a lifeline. Christians were originally called followers of the Way, and that way is a journey of thankfulness.
Our thanks for all the things that God has gifted to us, starting with our life in Him, helps establish our relationship with Him. This helps us to open our hearts to His love, and realizing how we join in the Church as the Bride of Christ in marriage to Him in community with our Church family. We don’t live in a communist society or even a capitalist society as a Christian, we live in a gift society, that is, gifts from God shared with one another. The Jesus Prayer that we as Orthodox strive to pray throughout the day expresses this economy of gratitude , too. “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me.”
By it we seek to remember the spark of God’s love in our heart, and to kindle it, as we would nurture a campfire, and implicit in this we are recognizing and remembering His love for us, in gratitude for this gift. Economy comes from a Greek word meaning law of the household, and it means theologically in orthodoxy the condescension of God to us, the help He gives us every day.
In daily prayer it can be good to remember what we have to be grateful for, and the Jesus prayer helps us remember. Our families, both in the world and our Church family, and above all God’s grace, energize with the love of God. This is one reason why in the secular world the American season of Thanksgiving has endured as our national holiday. But there is this deeper, more ancient, and more powerful spiritually sense of Thanksgiving in Orthodoxy. It is not for worldly things, and it is not a noun but an active verb, to give thanks.
And we are now in the season of Orthodox Thanksgiving, the Dormition Fast. The Dormition or falling asleep of the Mother of God is also called Summer Pascha. As the icons depict, at the repose of the Theotokos, Her son our Lord Jesus Christ comes to take her soul, which in our iconography holds like a baby to take up to heaven. Three days after her passing, according to Church Tradition, her body has vanished from the tomb, taken up also into heaven. She becomes the first regularly born human being upon death to be taken into heaven, with her soul reunited with her body, the first after her Son to experience the Resurrection that we all will experience, God willing, at the Second Coming of Christ. Thus she becomes our intercessor and help, our Mother in the Church, whom we can ask for help in praying for us to her Son in Heaven.
As our friend Father Vedran from St. George Serbian Church, in Hermitage Pennsylvania, posted this weekend, “Approach the Theotokos with simplicity and humility, and you will find that she will answer you before you even finish your prayer.”
For the Dormition season commemorates her coming into Heaven beyond the Final Judgement, with her Son bringing human nature into heaven, and thus personifying for us the eschatological consummation of the Church and our hope in faith and love for salvation in Christ her Son.
Thus, embedded within the Dormition season like jewels are the three spas or feasts of our Lord and God and God and Savior Jesus Christ, Who was born from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and shephered her as the first fruit of the Church so to speak into heaven beyond the Final Judgment.
There is the Feast of the Holy Wood of the Life-Giving Cross that we marked on Friday, which inaugurated the Dormition season, and also marked the Feast of the All-Merciful Saviour and His Most Holy Mother, commemorating the victories under the Cross of Byzantine and Russian armies preserving Christian lands against Muslim invaders in the Middle Ages. These are forgotten shadow wars to the West today, as with the battles of the Seven Maccabean heroes from Scripture also commemorated at the start of the Dormition season. Yet preserved by the Cross and earlier by types of the Church, we remember those victories and martyrdoms as contributing to the life of our Church, the fulfillment of Israel.
On the first day of the Dormition Season we commemorated the Holy Wood of the Tree of the Cross, we blessed the waters of Creation, and the honey of the bees. For the Dormition of our Mother reminds us also that we should be as bees, drawing nectar into good fruit for our Lord, rather than like flies occupied with nasty and wicked worldly things of the devil. The blessings of Creation’s good fruit, the gifts of God, continues with our Lord’s feast of the Transfiguration this coming Tuesday night and Wednesday, when we will bless all manner of fruits in what is also known as the Apple Fast. We honor at this major feast of our Lord within the Dormition season the uncreated light shown radiating from Him to His closest apostles on Mount Tabor. This was a full revelation of the uncreated energies of God, the open secret of Christian teaching preserved fully only by the Orthodox Church. This showed forth the oneness with God through His uncreated light exemplified by the Theotokos in achieving theosis, which the Orthodox Church teaches is the ultimate purpose and meaning of humanity in the lives of the saints, in which we can share in the mysteries of the Church with the prayers of the Theotokos and all the saints.
On the Feast of the Dormition next week, we will bless the flowers and fragrant herbs of the earth. And the next day after the Dormition we will bless the nuts and grains of the earth, in what is known as the Nut feast but liturgically is the commemoration of the Mandylion, the image made without hands, the precious prototype of iconography. For in that image Christ’s face is imprinted, and some see a relation here with the Shroud of Turin. This reminds us in line with the Dormition to extend our thanksgiving to the spiritual gifts of God evident in His Church as well as His meeting of our earthly needs.
Brothers and sisters, we may as Americans love the beautiful tradition of American Thanksgiving near the end of the autumn and beginning of winter. But even deeper we as American Orthodox Christians go with this season of Orthodox Thanksgiving. It is not so much about new discovery and settlement and colonization, as about primordial and cosmic mysteries of daily life and yearly cycles leading up to the final end times, for us as believers in the Body of Christ. This time of year also reminds us of the urgent need for us in giving thanks to bring others into the safety of our Lord’s Church in these latter days.
In blessing the fruits, water, and wood of the earth at this time, the Church reminds us of how the late summertime falling-asleep of our Mother the Theotokos shows us the Way that is her Son, and in the Body of Christ the journey of theosis before us, leading from earthly blessings toward the Final Judgement and Resurrection in Him, God willing. In this time we partake of gratitude and repentance and look toward the God-blessed fruits of our labors in the Church. For the end and beginning of the Church year approach, brothers and sisters. Shortly after this Dormition season we will commemorate the beheading of John the Baptist, the last of the Old Testament Prophets, and the end of the current Church year of 7534 after Creation by the Byzantine reckoning still used on Mount Athos and in traditional Orthodoxy. The Cburch new year will then start again, commemorating the day of Creation, but the year of 7535, leading directly to the Nativity of the Theotokos in a short time. It links us in a chronology of our Church family all the way back to the Old Testament prophets and our fore-parents Adam and Eve. Thus the Church circles us by experience of her services through the events of the Gospels and Tradition back to the beginning of time and all the way forward again and beyond, so we are there with those events here in our little Church, and also in the experience of our lives and the cosmos at large. We journey to the end our Church year with a focus on gratitude in the next two weeks, a time also for the mystery of confession as part of thanksgiving. St. Cyprian of Carthage could have been writing of this wonderful season of Orthodox thanksgiving when he wrote, to have God as a Father, you must first have the Church as your Mother. Glory to God for all things!