THE COMING MONTH, 1

AUGUST is divided almost exactly in half, because the first fourteen days comprise the Dormition Fast, which is short but kept with almost the same rigor as the Great Lent, and the last fortnight or so falls outside that fast. The month is also adorned with five major festivals. The Great Feasts of the Transfiguration of Christ and the Dormition of the Mother of God are, of course, pre-eminent among these. But we also have the festival of the Procession of the Honourable Wood of the Cross on the first day of the month, and that of the Translation of the Holy Napkin, the Icon of our Saviour Not-Made-By-Hands, on the day after the Dormition, - two other feasts of the Lord. Near the end of the month, on 29th August / 11th September, we also have the fifth feast, one of St John the Baptist, his Beheading.

This year both the Dormition and the Beheading of St John the Baptist fall on Sundays, and so their services are combined with those of the Lord’s Resurrection and are chanted together. The feast of the Beheading is kept as a fastday, whereby we are instructed to align ourselves with the ascetical witness of the Baptist rather than with the life of partying and dissipation which led to Herod’s downfall. Even though it falls on a Sunday this year, we still keep it as a fast day, although we are permitted wine (alcohol) and oil, but not fish. In previous years we have often dealt on these feasts and their significance, and much can be found on them in other sources, so perhaps we should this year devote the space we have to some of the saints who are celebrated inAugust:-

On the first day of the month, in addition to the Procession we have a festival of Jewish martyrs: the Seven Maccabees and their mother Solomonia and their teacher Eleazar. Their history is told in the Old Testament book of IIMaccabees. They suffered in the second century before Christ. At that time, after the immense conquests of Alexander the Great, the Holy Land was under the rule of Hellenistic rulers. One, Antiochus Epiphanes, resolved to bring the Jewish people to paganism. He was helped in his intentions by certain disaffected and unfaithful people within the Jewish hierarchy itself. Coming to Jerusalem, Antiochus introduced the customs of the pagan Greeks, which deeply shocked the pious Jews, and among other things he ordered the Jews to break the Old Testament prohibition against eating pork. Eleazar, a faithful priest and the teacher of the seven, refused, and even refused to pretend to eat pork. He was therefore tortured and burned to death. The seven sons of Solomonia were taken with their mother to Antioch, and there, because they steadfastly followed the faithfulness of their preceptor, they were each horribly tortured and put to death. When the last, a three-year-old boy was thrown into the fire, his mother threw herself into the flames and gained the crown of martyrdom with her children. It is calculated that they died in the year 167 B.C. Our carelessness in keeping the fasts and sometimes even dismissing them as matters of secondary importance contrasts unfavourably with the martyrs’ steadfastness in remaining faithful to their religious principles with regard to the fast. Their feast placed here at the very start of the Dormition Fast should encourage us in our struggle. They contested for righteousness even before Grace was imparted through the incarnate dispensation of our Saviour. We who have received so much greater blessings than they knew should be even more assiduous than they in remaining faithful to the traditions of the Church.