The Shepherd, November 2007

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THE COMING MONTH

IN NOVEMBER, we turn our attention more earnestly to the approaching celebration of the Saviour’s Nativity at Bethlehem in Judah (Christmas).  This is done in two ways: in mid-November (15th/28th) we begin the forty-day fast in preparation for the festival and we also celebrate the Great Feast of the Entrance of the All-holy Theotokos into the Temple (21st November / 4th December), which event both marks the beginning of the end of the Old Testament preparation for the Incarnation of the Word of God, and the Virgin’s personal preparation for her unique rôle as the one who would bear God in the flesh.

The Church is always attentive to our physical as well as our spiritual needs, and so, as this fast falls in the Winter months, it is less strict than the Great Lent which proceeds Pascha and is a little shorter.  However, we refain from all meat and dairy products; fish is permitted only on Saturdays and Sundays until but not after 13th/26th December; wine and oil are permitted on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on the other days we kept an “f3” fast.  On certain feastdays which fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, we are permitted wine and oil, and of the Great Feast of the Entrance, we are permitted fish.  As always during the fasts, in addition to this food fast, which is fundamental to our struggle and sets its tone, we should fast spiritually, from the passions, from the sins.  To help us achieve this we should avoid entertainments and unnecessary travelling.  Married couples abstain from marital relations.  And, as we cannot simply create a vacuum in our lives without harm, we should take up various spiritually profitable things: attending church services more assiduously, reading spiritually profitable works,  studying the Faith, trying to improve our private prayer regime, preparing for and going to confession, practising the virtues.  The Church particularly at this time directs us towards almsgiving, which is itself a type of fasting (denying oneself something of the material possessions that we have) and an exercise in practising the virtues, because we are showing love and care for others, the people to whom we give alms.  Any ascetic practice which is entirely self-absorbed is already mis-conceived.

In November we celebrate a saint, whose prayers will surely help us in practising almsgiving, and whose whole life is such an example of almsgiving that he is known as St John the Almsgiver or the Merciful.  His feast day is 12th / 25th November, a few days before the Nativity Fast begins, and this year a Sunday.   St John was from Amathus in Cyprus, and as a young man he married and had a family.  However, through the providence of God he was widowed and all his children died, so he dedicated his life to the service of God.  In the year 610, he was elected and consecrated as Patriarch of Alexandria.  On the day of his consecration he ordered that a reckoning be made of all the poor and the beggars in the City, whom he referred to as his Masters.  7,500 were found.  The new Patriarch ordered that they were to be given decent clothes and fed every day at the expense of the Church, and he made an extremely bold prayer to the Lord: “We will soon see, O Lord, which of us two will win the contest: Thou, who ever givest me good gifts, or I who will never cease distributing them to the poor”!  Once the saint commanded one of the clergy to give alms to a certain rich man who had fallen on hard times, and the clergymen reasoned that it was not sensible to give so much to one man, and one who had been rich in any case, so he only gave a third of what was ordered by the saint.  However, St John rebuked him when a certain benefactor admitted in giving the Church alms that she had been  going to give him three times as much but had been somehow restrained from doing so.  In 614 A.D., the Persians invaded the Holy Land, and St John received and helped the many refugees that flooded into Egypt and Alexandria.  He sent ships with provisions to Palestine, and later provided funds to rebuild the churches of the Orthodox there.  When thanked for his kindnesses, he would always tell people that he had not yet done anything worthy of thanks, because he had not yet laid down his life for them as the Saviour commands.  The saint also constantly taught the people and exhorted them to the life of holiness.  He greatly supported the monks and himself lived a very austere ascetic life.  Seeing that he lived in a tiny cell with no home-comforts, a benefactor once gave him a fine bed cover.  But the saint could not sleep at all that night, thinking of those who were materially worse off than himself.  The next day he sold the bed-cover and gave the money away in alms.  His whole life was a ministry of love, but that love was not simply something soft or indulgent, as part of his ministry of love he was strict in warning his flock never to attend the services of the Monophysite heretics, who were at that time gaining ascendancy in Egypt.  Just before his blessed repose the saint returned to his native Cyprus, because the Persians advanced on Egypt and the Governor requested that he do so.  He reposed in the year 614, and a fragrant myron flowed from his sacred relics, just as the fragrance of almsgiving had perfumed his whole life.

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