THE COMING MONTH, 1

THE CHURCH DAY begins in the evening, just as we read in the very first verses of the Holy Scriptures - “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” So the day is an icon of our life: the evening is the short course of this life which closes in death which is night time, the morning is the resurrection followed by the resplendence of noon, the life of the age to come. So every day of our life we are reminded of the purpose of this life: to prepare ourselves for the never-ending Day.

 The Church Year is ordered in a similar way. It begins on the 1st September, in autumn time, the evening of the year. Winter follows as a icon of death, and then the Spring, with first Great Lent, our spiritual resurrection and then Pascha, the Lord’s resurrection. The Summer months portray the unwaning day of the life of the Age to Come.

 Again we are forcefully reminded of the reality of things. Our natural inclination, as fallen creatures, is to think of this life as never-ending, to put death out of our thoughts, to live as if this life were all that matters, and to neglect the future life, rather than prepare for it, as Christians should. For people of a worldly disposition we begin the day with the morning, and it ends with the night, full stop. Moreover they party into the night. They prefer not to consider the end. The Orthodox way of marking time, through the day, and through the year, teaches us another, wiser, way.

 In the Church New Year, we have another important marker concerning our spiritual journey. On the eighth day of the New Year, we celebrate the Birth of the All-holy Theotokos, and so we see from the very beginning that we are not left solely to our own devices, but that we are given aid from on high. This celebration too harks back to the first verses of Genesis. Then, God created all things in six days and rested on the seventh day. For that reason the eighth day is used throughout Scripture as an image of the life of the Age to come. It is also the day of the resurrection, as we celebrate it week by week. The Virgin’s Birth is positioned on the eighth day of the New Year specifically to open unto us the life of the new creation, of the life of the redeemed.

 The first creation is seen to have been parched and rendered barren through the fall of man, and through the consequences of his sin and disobedience. The obedience of Mary - “Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word!” - makes it fruitful again, and so we sing (Ode 8 of the canon):

“Husbandman of our thoughts and Gardener of our souls,
Thou hast made the barren earth fertile.
Thou hast turned the ground that once was parched
into fruitful land, rich in corn and bearing fruit.
From holy Anna Thou hast made to blossom
an undefiled fruit, the Theotokos.”

 It is the earth’s riches in corn and fruit that we celebrate day by day throughout the Church Year: the Saints of God and the miracles wrought for our salvation.

 The festival is kept only for five days, because on 14th / 27th September, we have a second Great Feast, that of the Universal Exaltation of the Cross. This feast falls on a Wednesday this year, but whether it does or not, it is kept as a fast day, to honour the saving Passion of our Saviour. Primarily this feast celebrates the finding of the True Cross by the Empress St Helena in A.D. 326. Then it was raised up (exalted) by the Patriarch Macarius of Jerusalem. The service also alludes to the vision of the Cross which was granted to St Helena’s son, the Emperor St Constantine the Great in the year 312, which led to his adopting the Cross as a trophy of victory and, eventually, to his bringing the persecution of the Church to an end and his own conversion. A third event celebrated on this day, and the reason why the feast is kept on this day, is the celebration of the anniversary of the consecration of the original Church of the Resurrection (the Holy Sepulchre) in Jerusalem, which took place on 13th September, 335 A.D. A special feast is still observed by the Orthodox on the 13th, commemorating this event, but it is of course intimately connected with the Cross, which was found within the environs of that church and was venerated there for generations. A fourth event is included in today’s festival, the return of the Cross from Persia. The Persians had invaded the Holy Land in A.D. 614, and had taken the Cross as a part of their loot. Fifteen years later, in 629, they in turn were beaten in battle by the Emperor Heraclius and the Byzantines, and, as part of the peace pact, the True Cross was returned to Jerusalem and restored to the Church there. A fifth event might be added to this list now: the appearance of the Cross over the Church of St John the Theologian near Athens in 1925, where the traditionalist Orthodox Christians were keeping Vigil for the feast on the Church Calendar. The series of these events bring home to us the providential care which the Saviour has afforded His Church and her faithful members throughout history. It is why, before we begin any task, any meal or any journey, we sign ourselves with the sign of the Cross and ask a blessing.

 In Mattins for this feast, we chant: