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The Dormition Fast of the Theotokos

08/14/2024

The feast of the Dormition or Falling-asleep of the Theotokos is celebrated on the fifteenth of August, preceded by a two-week fast. This feast, which is also sometimes the Assumption, commemorates the death, resurrection and glorification of Christ’s mother. It proclaims that Mary has been “assumed” by God into the heavenly kingdom of Christ in the fullness of her spiritual and bodily existence. As with the nativity of the Virgin and the feast of her entrance to the temple, there

The Fourteenth Day of Christmas Advent. Eternal God: A Little Child

11/28/2022

By Fr John Breck, December 1, 2007 Thanksgiving is over and we are moving toward what one of our wise and dedicated priests refers to as “Getmas.” He is as frustrated and dismayed at what exuberant commercialism and American popular religion have done to Christmas as I am with the relentless efforts to transform our national feast of Thanksgiving into “Turkey Day.” These campaigns are insidious and they’ve been highly effective: God—the true God who

The Dormition Fast: Ending another Year of Grace in Our Lord

08/01/2019

The Byzantine Church since at least the 5th century has practiced a period of fasting prior to the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. This ancient custom has much to offer contemporary Christians. Christians of the East have always recognized the mystery of Our Lady’s Dormition, her ‘falling asleep’ at the end of her natural life. The passage of Mary the Virgin Mother of God from this life to life eternal is a cause

Let Us Discern Between the Living and the Dead

07/18/2016

Today, many historical forms of Christianity are dead or dying. Trying to preserve them through blind conservatism can lead only to the creation of malicious and distrustful ghettos which idolize formalism, or to “fascist” adventures that lead nowhere. On the contrary, we must trust in the “newness of the Spirit,” who will transform this death into resurrection. New approaches are already developing, approaches which rediscover and develop the deepest intuitions of thinkers such as Gregory

Eighteenth Day of Christmas Advent, Journey to Bethlehem, Part III

12/02/2015

By Father John Parker The Angels are rejoicing and proclaiming the Good News.  The Magi, journeying from afar, bear their gifts foreshadowing the divinity, sovereignty, and humanity of Christ.  The shepherds, the first Jews to believe, explain what they have seen and heard, leading others, too, to wonder! As we make our way, as if in a spiral towards the center of Rublev’s Nativity, we are greeted by a strange pair.  A couple we wouldn’t

Fourth Day of Christmas Advent, Journey to Bethlehem, Part I

11/18/2015

By Father John Parker About seven hundred years ago Andrei Rublev, or one of his disciples, painted perhaps the most memorable and beautiful icon of the Nativity of Christ. The 14th century icon is warped and cracked, but is in remarkable shape despite its age and history.  It tells us, in earthen pigments bound to the gesso plaster, the story of the birth of Jesus, each facet of the good news surrounding the Virgin Mother Mary and

MARY THE MEDIATRESS (Part VI)

08/12/2015

The members of this New Israel are a new, “holy nation, a peculiar people,” an ethnos without tribes or ethnicity, a nation with no abiding or ruling city here. In the New Israel, not only priests and kings but all the people are anointed with a new anointing, the holy chrism and seal of the Holy Spirit, into “a royal priesthood”39 inherited not through “the will of the flesh,”40 not through a family, tribe, or

The Dormition Fast of the Theotokos

08/03/2015

The feast of the Dormition or Falling-asleep of the Theotokos is celebrated on the fifteenth of August, preceded by a two-week fast. This feast, which is also sometimes the Assumption, commemorates the death, resurrection and glorification of Christ’s mother. It proclaims that Mary has been “assumed” by God into the heavenly kingdom of Christ in the fullness of her spiritual and bodily existence. As with the nativity of the Virgin and the feast of her entrance to the temple, there

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