The Shepherd, September 2009
THE COMING MONTH
THE CHURCH New Year falls on 1st / 14th September. There are several reasons for this. First, a very prosaic reason; the end of the harvest is the end of the agricultural year, and therefore to an agrarian society it was natural to think of the year as ending and thus also beginning at that time. The Old Testament New Year also fell about this time, although their calendar, being lunar, does not exactly correspond with ours. From this fact, it happens that it was at this time of year, that our Saviour took up the book of Esaias in his home-town of Nazareth and read the passage, “The spirit of the Lord is upon Me.... to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” This Scripture is read in our churches on this day for the present celebration. Furthermore it was on 1st September, A.D. 312, that the Emperor St Constantine the Great, won his signal victory over the forces of Maxentius, after seeing his vision of the Cross. That vision and his subsequent victory heralded a new period in Church history, which opened great opportunities for the Church’s mission, and was a new beginning. It too is remembered in our Church celebration of the New Year at this time.
Having the New Year in the Autumn also parallels our division of the days. Each day begins in the evening (see Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, & 31). Thus we have the evening as an icon of this short life, night as one of the sleep of death, and the dawn then of a day which has no evening (it belongs to the next day) as an icon of the unending Day of the Resurrection. In the annual cycle in place of evening, night and dawn , we have Autumn, Winter and Spring, but the same truth is proclaimed.
Furthermore, the cycle of Church Feasts is given a proper setting by this arrangement. Those in the Autumn and early Winter (with the exception of that of the Cross - see below) are concerned with the preparation for the coming of Our Saviour into this world (the Nativity of the Virgin - 8th September, and her Presentation - 21st November). In the midst of Winter, the darkest days, we have three Great Feasts (the Nativity of the Saviour, Theophany and the Meeting of the Lord) in which the Light of the World is manifest to us in our darkness. In the Spring, we have the commemoration of the Passion of the Saviour and His Resurrection from the dead, events which indeed happened at that time of year, leading on, as also was the case, to Pentecost, the full flowering of Summer. At the every end of the year we have the Transfiguration in which we see, as far as we are able, the Lord Jesus Christ clothed in the Divine Glory which is His, and in the Dormition, we see the first of our race (after Him), the Most Holy Mother of God, sharing in that glory - we have the hope of our future life and the year ends with that hope, as, may God grant, our life will too.
We have mentioned that the festival of the Cross is out of sequence. In fact there are two other anomalies here: the Annunciation does not fit into this scheme, and the Transfiguration is not in its historical sequence. The Annunciation falls in March, simply because it is placed nine months before our Saviour’s Birth in Bethlehem, it being the feast of His conception. The Transfiguration was originally celebrated in the early spring, before the Passion of the Lord, because He permitted Peter, James and John to see His Divine Glory, so that, as the contakion proclaims, “when they should see Thee crucified, they would know Thy Passion to be willing.” However, both for the reason cited in the paragraph above, and because this radiantly joyous festival always fell in the days of Great Lent, the celebration was moved from forty days before Great Friday, to forty days before the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.
|
