September - A month of great feasts

In our chapel communities, we do not have the blessing of regular services which expose directly us to the richness of the festal cycle of the Church. Church feasts – especially the great feasts of the Lord and the Theotokos –provide us with changes in emphasis and intensity in our spiritual life. Liturgical life, like our everyday human experience, is not the same every day and in every season.  The celebration of various events from the Gospel or from the rich tapestry of the Church’s Tradition helps us to understand and live out various realities of our life in the Spirit.  September is a month that provides with three feasts that bear some commentary here - since we can’t have the actual services for those feast days in our limited chapel schedule.   

SEPTEMBER 1 – THE BEGINNING OF THE CHURCH CALENDAR YEAR – A FEAST OF CREATION

In the Old Testament and in the experience of the Eastern Church over two millennia, autumn - time of harvest, has been the beginning of each new year.

Because it marks the renewal of the cycle of time, it also celebrates God’s creation of the universe, the beginning of time as we measure it by the movements and relationships of celestial bodies like the sun, earth and moon.

This feast celebrates the act of Creation, however God may have spun it out over eons of time; and it also looks forward to the fulfillment of all creation, both spiritual and physical in Christ, the Divine word made man in the matter of His own creation – the One who is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has emphasized the environmental importance of this feast over the past 15 years or so. God creates the world and its creatures in love and beauty and blesses them as “good.’  He makes humanity the caretaker and cultivator of creation, to oversee it with the same respect and love with which God has crafted it. Mankind is the be the priest of creation, receiving it not as a possession to be exploited but as something held in trust, to be consecrated to God by thanksgiving.

Adam and Eve reject that priestly vocation of thanksgiving and are deluded into using creation to contend with God – to want seize His power for themselves.  By their refusal to admit their error and repent, they make themselves incompatible with the life of Paradise. And they drag the created world into their fallen condition. They bring a curse upon themselves: alienation – from God, from one another, from creation, which contends with Adam and resists his efforts.

We see the consequences of this before our eyes: degradation of the natural world for the sake of profit, wholesale elimination of animal and ocean and plant life through unbridled exploitation or massive pollution, abuse of other human beings by genocide, enslavement, warfare, or other exploitation. Our modern era continues to present us with blatant examples of all of these things. Patriarch Bartholomew spares no words in identifying all of these as grave sins. Ancient sin stirred to a lethal froth of intensity in modern times.

But, yet, God’s Word gives us hope and deliverance from the Fall.  He assumes the fallen matter of His own creation. He is transfigured in glory on Mt Tabor, and with Him created matter is transfigured: his clothing, the mountaintop environment, Moses and Elijah who stand at his side reflecting divine energy and light. He comes to bring the Creation willed in love by His Father to fulfillment on the last and perfect and eternal Day.  Fulfillment in Him, the Alpha of creation and the Omega of redemption. Fulfillment through  intimate union with divine love.

September 8 – THE BIRTH OF THE MOTHER OF GOD (THEOTOKOS)

“…Your womb has become a divine paradise, planted with the divine fruit. If we eat of it, we shall live forever and not die like Adam. Christ has come to restore the Image He made in the beginning…” (Services before Christmas).

This feast, actually today’s feast, marks the birth of the Virgin Mary, recounted in the apocryphal literature of the Church. It’s the first of her feasts in the Church’s liturgical Tradition.  Its application for our lives follows along with the theme of the restoration of Paradise.  From her birth, this child of the barren Joachim and Ann is consecrated to become the dwelling place of God in the flesh, a living tabernacle, her womb a ‘paradise’ as the hymn says.  From this paradise, she bears the Word of God to the world.  In a less physically literal sense, we are to bear God’s Word to the world ourselves. The Holy Virgin is for us the prototypical Christian, our example.

From the beginning of the liturgical year, we are called to prepare to bear God to the world by our openness to Him, our trust in Him, our assent to Him - as well by our ongoing prayer, repentance, and practice of love for humankind and God’s world.

September 14 – THE ELEVATION OF THE HOLY CROSS

This feast is a commemoration of the recovery of the Cross from captivity by the Persian Empire, and also of the earlier discovery of the Cross in a Jerusalm rubbish heap by St Helena. But it is really more an occasion for us to lift up the cross of the Lord and to embrace it in our lives.  The cross was an example of the perversion of a natural part of God’s creation for the purpose of cruelty and death extreme degradation of the human person. But by ascending the Cross in perfect trust toward His Father and in incalculable love for us, Christ transforms it to be a new Tree of Life.  His tomb becomes another hidden paradise.  “Trampling down death by death,” Christ takes Adam and Eve and all of us by His divine-human hand and draws us from  death to life.  From the earthly cycle of beginnings and ends, from constant corruptibility, into the eternal and unending Day of His Glory. This coming Sunday, Sept. 11th, is the Sunday before the Elevation of the Holy Cross. I look forward to celebrating this day with you.  -  Fr Tom 9/8/22