Brothers and Sisters in the Lord,

Our season for honoring the Mother of God, the Theotokos, is upon us. For these two weeks, we will fast and pray to prepare ourselves to honor the Dormition, the Koimoissis, of Mary, the Mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The origins of this feast itself are unclear, but we know that by the mid-sixth century, August 15 was fixed as the day of her Dormition and the Church has celebrated this as one of the great feasts in the liturgical year ever since.

On this day we gather in the Church, symbolically at Mary’s tomb, just as the apostles themselves did according to our Tradition. There, we ask for a maternal blessing on our lives. As one of the hymns of the day says, “O believers, come, let us go unto the tomb of the Mother of God and embrace it longingly, and with sincerity touch it with our lips and eyes and foreheads of our hearts, and we shall then obtain from that ever-welling fountain the divine gifts of healing that issue abundantly.”

According to Tradition, the apostles were transported to her bedside, all but Thomas, to be with Mary in her final days. This, to me, is a great symbol of the unity of the apostolic faith about Mary’s role in our salvation and the unity of the Church.

During the dekapentavgousto, the Church invites us to pray the Paraklesis to the Theotokos as a community, with one voice, one heart, and one mind. In our deeply divided world, when we pray in unity we offer a profound witness to those around us.

We send a counter-cultural message of unity amid the many forces that seek to divide.

During the Paraklesis, we ask for the Mother of God to intercede for us and to offer comfort to us. As the part of the Kontakion of the feast reads, “The Theotokos is undying in intercession. Immovable is our hope in her for protection.” Oftentimes, people ask what they should pray for in these services. Just looking at the state of our world and the question should answer itself: war killing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of innocents; natural disasters – floods and fires –  that have ended lives, destroyed homes and livelihoods; injustice and inequity endures.

When any of us would have even the simplest of problems we would run and turn to our mother for protection, for comfort, for guidance. In the face of these great problems who else should we turn to, except our heavenly Mother, the intercessor.

The Feast of the Dormition contains within it a great mystery of our Orthodox faith. As the Tradition says, Thomas was not present when Mary reposed. He arrived three days after her burial and proceeded to her tomb. When it was opened for him, Mary’s body was gone, only her burial shroud remained. As the hymns of the day relate, we believe she was translated to heaven and leave it as a mystery.

During dekapentavgousto, the Church also celebrates another Great Feast – that of the Transfiguration of Christ on August 6. This feast is truly one of the greatest for in the event of Christ’s transfiguration before His apostles Peter, James, and John, He revealed Himself in all his glory. In this moment Jesus the man is revealed to be the Son of God. Its theological importance cannot be underestimated. It offers a vision of the resurrection of all things in the kingdom of God. The feast is celebrated 40 days before the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross – September 14 – making an unmistakable connection for us about the identity of Christ, the transfigured one, is the crucified and resurrected one.

Beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord, the Church gives us this summer season of feasts for our spiritual benefit. After the relaxing days of summer, the time has come to invigorate our spiritual lives, through the prayers and liturgies and services of these two weeks in our parishes and through the ascetic discipline of our fast in our homes. Use these two weeks to pray to the Mother of God, asking her for comfort and asking her to intercede on our behalf with her Son for the life of our world.

Χρόνια Πολλά to all those who will celebrate their Feast Days in this holy season.

God bless you!