The Shepherd, June 2008
THE COMING MONTH
JUNE opens this year the day before one of the greatest feasts of the Church Year, but one which often seems to be overlooked by all but the most attentive Orthodox Christians, the Great Feast of Pentecost-Trinity. This should be kept with as much devotion and solemnity as the festivals of Easter and Christmas. Indeed, no less a Father than Saint John Chrysostom says: “But recently we celebrated the feast of the Cross, the Passion, the Resurrection, then the Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ to Heaven. Today we have reached the very summit, the capital itself of the feasts, to the very maturing of the promise of the Lord.” His is a zeal for the feast which, if the numbers attending church on this day compared with those at Pascha are anything to go by, is not shared by those who profess to be his spiritual children, the Orthodox Christians of our day. Perhaps this is because our attention is drawn to the festivals of the Nativity and Pascha by the fact that we have prolonged fasts before them as a preparation for their celebration. Immediately before Pentecost Sunday there is no fast, but rather, because we are in a festal period, a relaxation of the usual fasting disciplines. However, we fail to recognise that there is a fast which prepares us for this celebration, the Holy and Great Lent. For this feast is but the culmination of our paschal celebration. It is, as the opening lines of the Gospel appointed for the feast proclaims, “the last day, that great day of the feast.” If we intend to live as Orthodox Christians we should always strive to keep it as such.
The event which the festival primarily celebrates is the Descent upon the Apostles of the Holy Spirit in the form of cloven fiery tongues, and the beginning of the apostolic ministry of preaching the Gospel, recorded in the second chapter of the Book of Acts. Moreover, as we read there, the sacramental life of the New Testament Church is inaugurated on this day. We read of the first converts, who heard St Peter’s teaching: “Then they that gladly received his word were baptized; and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and in fellowship, and in the breaking of bread [Communion], and in prayers.” Those same things constitute the life of pious and Orthodox Christians of every age and of every land even to this day; they are what the writer of the first article in this issue, taken from the Greek language publication of the Monastery of Saints Cyprian and Justina in Fili, repeatedly refers to as the “right way of life.”
Perhaps this last fact indicates another reason why this festival is not observed as popularly today as it deserves. Many contemporary Orthodox think of their faith (if they think of it at all!) as simply a adjunct of the culture of a home-country from which their forebears or they themselves have come; others as simply the “denomination’ that they attend (or perhaps do not!); others perhaps even as the true faith. But few would allow that it is the “right way of life” - because that would entail a life of commitment and struggle. And yet it is only when we begin to grasp our Orthodoxy as a right way of life that it can become effectual in our lives, changing them and us, preparing us to become citizens not of this world but of the Kingdom of Heaven.
After Pentecost Sunday, we have a whole series of Sundays in which we celebrate those of our predecessors who did indeed comprehend that their Orthodox confession of the Faith necessitated a “right way of life.” On the very next Sunday, (9th / 22nd June), we have the Feast of All Saints. Following that, on Sunday 16th / 29th June, we have the Synaxis of the Fathers of the Holy Mountain Athos, and, in the Russian Church, All the Saints who have shone forth from the Land of Russia. And on Sunday 23rd June / 6th July, we have the Synaxis of All the New Martyrs who suffered under the Turkish Yoke. Some other traditionally Orthodox peoples also have commemorations of the saints of their lands at this time. Many of the saints that we celebrate on these Sundays, lived in relatively recent or even contemporary times. Many of them, because they are celebrated in “national” groups by the various Local Churches, come from places and regions which contemporary Orthodox Christians know and have lived in themselves. And so every excuse is taken away from us. We cannot pretend that sanctity belongs to another place or another time, and is beyond our reach here and now. We, like these saints, can and should struggle to live the “right way of life.”
The other most noticeable thing in June is of course the Apostles’ Fast. This always begins on the Monday after All Saints’ Day and ends on the eve of the feast of Sts Peter and Paul (29th June / 12th July). This means that it varies in length from year to year, because it begins on a day determined by the moveable feast of Easter, and ends on a specific date on the fixed calendar. This year, as Pascha was comparatively late, the fast is very short, lasting only 19 days. It may vary in length from between eight days and forty-three days.
This is one period of the year when the deficiency of the so-called New Calendar is abundantly clear. The Orthodox who use the New Calendar still, with the exception of the Church in Finland, calculate Pascha on the traditional reckoning, but they keep the immovable feasts of the year on the Gregorian reckoning. This means that every year their Apostles’ fast is thirteen days shorter than it should be. In years when the fast would be less than thirteen days in any case, the fast disappears. I once asked a friend, a New Calendarist priest, about this, and he explained that on such occasions, in his Church, they fast for three days in Pentecost Week itself, - but this is a week when on account of the importance of the festival Orthodox Christians do not fast! So, unfortunately, one mistake is compounded by another. This, on a small scale, is the “method’ employed in the post-schism West, where a distortion in doctrine or practice is compensated for by the implementation of another erroneous belief or practice. So, for instance, a distorted view of the ancestral sin of Adam led in time to the invention by the Roman Catholics of the erroneous idea of the immaculate conception of Mary the Mother of God. It is not a path to start out upon.
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