THE COMING MONTH

THERE are two pivotal points in the Church Year: the Nativity- Theophany celebration in mid-Winter, and, pre-eminently, the Passiontide-Pascha celebration in the Spring. But Orthodox Christians might be forgiven for thinking that there was a third pivot; the celebrations in August of the Lord’s Transfiguration (6th/19th) and the Dormition of the All-holy Virgin (15th/28th), and the celebrations which are attached to these two Great Feasts.

The feast of the Dormition is preceded with a preparatory fast, which lasts only two weeks, but which is kept as strictly as the Great Lent in the Spring. In the Greek practice, one which we follow here at Brookwood, the Supplicatory Canon to the Theotokos (Paraklesis) is chanted every day, alternating the Great one with the Little. Thus during the fast, we make a special point of turning to the Mother of God in prayer asking her supplications for us - this, to strengthen us in our preparation for her festival, the last of the Great Feasts in the Church Year and in many ways their culmination.

There are also two other feasts of the Lord celebrated this month: the Procession of the Honourable Wood of the Cross (1st/14th) and the Translation of the Image of the Saviour Not Made by Hands, the Holy Mandilion, to Constantinople (16th/29th). In the Russian practice these, along with the Transfiguration, are called the First, Second and Third [Feasts of the] Saviour.

The feast of the Procession was inaugurated because in Constantinople at that period of the year, the Summer heat made plagues and maladies abound, and a relic of the Precious Wood was daily taken around the city for the protection and healing of the suffering people. Today we keep it, because the Cross still bestows upon us protection from evils and grants us healing and strength. The feast of the Mandilion commemorates the bringing to Constantinople of the icon miraculously imprinted by our Saviour Himself on a towel, and sent to the Prince Abgar of Edessa for his healing. So both these celebrations remind us of the Saviour’s loving care for us in all the circumstances of life.

Also in August we celebrate the Beheading of the Honourable Prophet, Forerunner and Baptist John (29th August / 11th September). Although not included in the number of the Twelve Great Feasts, this celebration is usually kept with a Vigil Service. It is also kept as a fast day, whatever day of the week it might fall. This year it falls on a Monday and so wine (alcohol) and oil are permitted but fish is not. We fast on this day following the example of the Baptist himself, who was renowned even in his lifetime for the ascetical manner of his life, and also to dissociate ourselves from the example of Herod and Herodias, who were eating, drinking, and partying, and as so often happens in such circumstances therefore fell even deeper into sin.

Among the saints we celebrate in August, we have:

The Holy Martyrs Florus and Laurus (18th / 31st) were brothers according to the flesh and they worked as stonemasons. They lived in Illyria and they were commissioned by the local prince to build a pagan temple. The pagan priest came to watch the proceedings, and it happened that as the brothers worked a splinter of stone flew into the eye of the young son of the priest and left him blinded in that eye and bleeding. Naturally the priest was greatly disturbed and wanted the brothers punished, but the brothers told him that if he believed in the God Whom they worshipped, his son would be restored to health. They then prayed and made the sign of the Cross over the poor boy’s eye, and he was instantaneously healed. The priest and his son were baptised seeing this miracle, and both subsequently died as martyrs themselves. Florus and Laurus completed the temple, then raised a Cross above it and had it consecrated as a Christian church. Hearing this the prince had them thrown into a dry well and buried there alive. They thus completed their martyric course victoriously in the second century. Generations later, after St Constantine the Great had freed the Church from persecution, their sacred relics were retrieved and found to be incorrupt. They were taken to Constantinople, the new Imperial City. St Laurus is the name-saint of our Metropolitan Lavr.

The Holy Hieromartyr Kuksha & the Venerable Pimen (27th August / 9th September) were monks in the Kiev Caves Monastery. St Kuksha was granted to preach to the pagan Wallachians, and journeyed among them, teaching them and baptising them. Some pagans, resenting his mission, fell upon him and slew him and so he died as a martyr. At the moment that he died, Pimen the Faster was praying in church in Kiev, and he saw in the spirit the martyrdom of his brother and friend. He cried out: “Our brother Kuksha has this day been slain for the Gospel.” Immediately he had said this, he himself breathed his last in the year 1113 A.D, so that he entered into the heavenly realms with his beloved brother.