The Shepherd, July 2007
THE COMING MONTH
JULY is one of the two months in the year in which there are never any Great Feasts or special fasting periods, except of course, the normal Wednesday and Friday fasting - see canon above. It, in fact, falls neatly between the Apostles’ Fast, which ends on 28th June, and that of the Dormition, which begins on 1st August.
As we have observed many times in previous years, July is, however, preeminently the month of the Saints of Russia. Many of the most beloved Saints of that huge Orthodox country have their feast days in this month, and we also have the festivals of two of the most beloved Russian icons of the Mother of God, that of Kazan and that of Smolensk, to grace the month. In addition we have the feasts of two saints, who were not Russian at all, and had no connection with that country in their life-times, but who are greatly revered among the Russians: the Holy Prophet Elias (Elijah) of Old Testament times, and the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon, to whom the principal Russian community on the Holy Mountain Athos is dedicated.
In the twentieth century - the Ugly Century, - the number of Saints of Russia was increased immensely by the host of New Russian Martyrs. Russia was a land which before had had few martyrs, but hosts of monastic saints, of holy hierarchs and of royal saints, and numbers of fools-for-Christ. However, in July, among the great saints of Russia, we celebrate two who were the very first martyrs in the Russian land, and who, like the British first martyrs Julius and Aaron, are not widely known: Saints Theodore the Varangian and his son John.
In 984 A.D. the Great Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus’, not yet a Christian, won a victory and subdued some troublesome tribesmen and wished to celebrate with a human sacrifice to his pagan gods. The choice for the victim fell upon Theodore’s son, John, but Theodore had lived in the Byzantine lands to the south and he and his son had become Christians. He refused to allow his son to be offered in sacrifice to pagan gods, and proclaimed that they worshipped “the God Whom the Greeks served.” This refusal stirred up the wrath of the prince and his peoples. A mob attacked their house and the two of them were violently done to death, thus receiving their martyrs’ crowns. They were the first in the Russian lands to shed their blood for Christ, but the seed thus sown brought forth a pletious harvest - four years after their contest, Vladimir himself converted and led his people into the Orthodox Church, the birth of what was to become Holy Russia. According to St Nicolas (Velimirovic), childless women and those prone to miscarrying resort to these sants in prayer.
|
