The Feast of Dormition

We have run through the entire cycle of the liturgical year, and we have passed through all the stages of the life of our Lord Jesus Christ: his nativity, his teaching, his death on the cross and his glorious Resurrection, his ascent into heaven, his sitting at the right hand of the Father. Christ's earthly mission on behalf of humanity is fully completed with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The life of the Church, the Body of Christ, begins on that day. The Holy Spirit reveals himself through the saints, and their radiance in the world is the fruit.

The Church reserves a very special place among the saints for Mary, the most-holy Mother of God. Through her, the Son of God became the Son of man. Her virgin womb is more spacious than the heavens, as we say in our hymns, because it contained God. The infinite, limitless God has allowed himself to be contained in the womb of a mother. The body of the most-holy Virgin was the physical envelope which assisted the incarnation. This is why the liturgical year, which is the image of the life of Christ, is also circumscribed by two events in the life of Mary, her birth and her death. In fact, the first feast of the liturgical year is the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8). The last feast of the year is her death, the Dormition, celebrated on August 15. To mark the significance of this day, it is preceded by a two week fast as a period of preparation needed to glorify this event.

We may have no historical documentation about Mary's death; no scriptural text mentions her end. Only the apocryphal gospels contain a detailed account of the Virgin's death, placing it in Jerusalem. These writings inspired the icon and liturgical text of the feast. But these accounts, very late in origin and full of legendary detail, accounts which the Church has not accepted as canonical, should not be trouble for us, for the veneration of Mary is based not on folklore, but on Tradition, which is the complement of Scripture. Indeed Tradition is the living memory of the Church, a memory which is transmitted from generation to generation. Ever since the time of the Apostles, we keep in our memory the certainty that Mary, like her Son, has passed through death, and that like him she has risen. This is why the Feast of Dormition is a second Pascha, a passage from death to life.