the overcoming

Dormition Fast (August 1 - 14)

In general, in following our "nature" we want only to eat, drink, sleep and enjoy ourselves. However, Christianity calls us to a new birth in the Holy Spirit.... That birth of spirituality is a mystery to us, and that is precisely what scares off people. Christ said to Nicodemus "You must be born from above," and Nicodemus was frightened by those words. A righteous man and a lawyer, he immediately understood that this was more than a talk about the battle with sin, and anyone who has not taken the step, to even the slightest extent, into the supernatural, has not yet begun [the Christian journey]. However, that interior overcoming of nature, the overcoming on which rests all Christian podvig, i.e. of the everyday occurrences in Christian life, is merely "the sun in a tiny drop of water." All Christianity rests in the original, supernatural nature of the Divine Incarnation. The Church sings in the 9th Song of the Canon for the Dormition of the Virgin and Mother: "In thee, O Virgin without spot, the bounds of nature are overcome: for childbirth remains virginal and death is betrothed to life"
- S. I. Fudel, Notes on the Liturgy and the Church

Sergei Fudel notes that Christian life involves not only the struggle against sin - our fallen nature - but a striving for something beyond our nature - a positive transformation, a new birth in Christ. In other words, the path of Christian life has both a moral and a mystical dimension. Or to put it yet another way, the goal of our moral effort is holiness.

In this holiness it is not only sin that we strive to overcome, but also the bounds and limits of our nature, and above all the stark, inevitable limitation of death - the fact of death, the approach of death, the anxiety concerning death, the dying - that so shapes our entire experience in this life. For believers, our life in Christ is not just about becoming good and decent people - as wonderful and challenging a task that is! - but about a longing for purity, for love, for life, for the Kingdom of God.

The significance of the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God is that it gives a personal substantiation of the truth and reality of this deep longing. Our desire is vindicated in what happens to her when she dies: she makes of her death an act of life.

In the icon of Pascha - of the Resurrection, the Descent into Hades - we see Christ pulling Adam and Eve up out of Hades, yanking them hard by the hand out from that spiritual prison that signifies the rule of death. At the center of the icon of the Dormition, the Lord holds the Mother of God, child-like, in His arms, above her earthly body on its funeral bier. To be held by Christ! The truth of the Dormition, and our own hope, is grounded on the Paschal Mystery.

Perhaps our two week effort at keeping the fast should be inspired by this wonderful affirmation...