Every fasting set by the Church during the ecclesiastical year has a special identity of itself…As the ages of our biological and spiritual life evolve without cease and the world is in a permanent dynamics both horizontally and vertically. Thus every beginning of fasting gains a new horizon for our soul and more importantly has specific challenges doubled by according aims. Without a precise aim fasting weakens the spiritual authority it should impose to the one who practices it.
We enter the path of the fasting for the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God, a fasting in the middle of summer (referring at the specific season) which is for the Christians a fasting period of fulfillment of the spiritual fruit, of the spiritual harvest.
For two weeks we sow and reap in a haste the harvest of our personal faith and bring the oblation for the one called with so much grace and respect The Holy Mother of God. This `small rose of the deserts`as it was called with theological tenderness by Vladimir Volkoff, this olive tree twig on the trunk of Abraham (quote from the same thinker of the Russian exile) revived our spiritual life by the fruit of her womb, open for us all of a sudden the skies and offering us a view towards salvation through her Son. Her entire earthly life, which we don`t know exactly how many years it meant (but it is possible to have meant less than six decades) represented an endless row of miracles.
Like the beads of a rosary, from her own birth to the Birth of the Saviour of the world, the wondrous events of her life connected in a divine flawless and matchless logic.
No other mortal lived in such an intimacy with the Creator and shared and finalized His plans with so much care and no other mortal became worthy to put his entire being at the enlightened disposal of God as this wild flower of the Arabian deserts did` (again Vladimir Volkoff).
Sacrifice without rules, love without concupiscence, hope without any human reason, courage without manliness – exactly that unique maternal courage – the whole florilegium of experiences based only on the short conversation with the Angel define the spiritual profile of the one chosen to be bride to God, How not to worship her, how not to regard her as the Queen of angels and Mother of the new mankind?
That is why the Fasting for the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God awakens us to a spiritual life full of zeal and weakens in us the passions of the world which the earthly heavenly being of the Virgin drew away from her life as a sign that it is possible without them. Her Dormition into the eternity of life and her exit from the world, so smooth and discreet, so mysterious and wondrous is like the Birth of her Son: He avoided the temptations of the flesh and the struggle of the human anatomy and abolished the natural physiology (or who knows, He restored it) showing a superior aspiration of matter towards a possible heavenly status by the penetration of the Spirit. The entire life in human body of the pair Christ and the Holy Mother of God shows that the laws settled after Adam`s fall (the first body which lost the contemplative glory) may be abolished. The implacable definition of the corruptible matter unworthy of becoming heavenly is temporary. For this reason I say this: the aim of the fasting for the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God should be a heavenly one, an experiment of thinning the rough matter, a freeing of the soul from the passions which make it impervious at the blow of the Spirit. The aim is therefore the preparedness for the ascension towards the strong air of the skies rustling of kind angels!
Răzvan Bucuroiu
Source: http://ziarullumina.ro.
