August 15: the Dormition of the Theotokos

Like us all, the Mother of God entered the Mystery of death. But she did so as one consummately given over to Christ in an unending "fiat"--
i.e., an ever fulfilling and all-consuming response in grace upon grace to be transformed anew in grace: let it be done to me according to Thy will on earth as it is Heaven.

Through the "exodus" of death, the Theotokos enters the Passover of Christ.
Christ Himself forever changed every human death. He experienced our mortality, but experienced it as the victorious Lord of Life. That is why the Mystery of Holy Saturday is one of the greatest and most commonly misunderstood events in the life of Christ: "while the soul of Christ was in Paradise with the thief and His body lay in the tomb, yet He was one with the Father, infinite and filling all things." (Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom) Indeed, the Gospel of Mark proclaims this Mystery seen in faith by the Markan community: that the Roman Centurion witnesses the manner of His death -- through the tearing apart of the temple veil and the "trampling down of death by Death" -- and so confesses "Truly, this man was the Son of God."

Because all human nature belongs to Christ, and because Christ died in His humanity, every human death now belongs to His Pasch and His Mystery: the Mysteries of His Passover and His Resurrection.

For the baptized faithful -- those who are baptized into the death of Christ -- the Christian Church has named our human death a mere falling asleep into Christ.

And so we, in the Spirit in the Church, enter today the synergy of the fiat of the Theotokos. We mystically share her falling asleep in Christ. We mystically embrace her fiat as our own. And we witness that what happens to her life in Christ shall indeed happen in our own life in Christ.

With the Apostles we discover anew her body is missing from this earth. With the saints we see in faith: in place of her body we discover flowers in full bloom -- signs of love, yes and more: signs of the bloom of the resurrected body in the Beauty of Divine Love.

In the Mystery of His Resurrection, body and soul, the Theotokos is assumed into Heaven body and soul. Thus St. Mary is the first witness to the Apostle's Creed: she experiences firsthand the resurrection of the body. In this light the Oriental Orthodox Churches name the Feast of the Dormition as The Festival of the Ascension of the Theotokos.

The Icon of The Dormition illumines the scene (from the perspective of Heaven's Glory) when her soul departed painlessly from her body. Peter is by her head, and Paul is by her feet. The other apostles surround her, and Jesus with his angels is seen receiving her soul, which is pictured as a newborn baby in swaddling clothes -- i.e., the robes of those newly baptized into the death of Christ.
Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes on the Icon of the Dormition and the 8th Day of the New Aeon:
Rejoice, bright dawn of the Mystical Day (Akathist Hymn):
The light which pours from Dormition comes precisly from that never-ending mystical Day. In contemplating this death and standing at this deathbed we understand that death is no more, that a person's very act of dying has now become an act of living, the entrance into a larger life, where Life reigns. ... Here death is conquered from within, freed from all that fills it with horror and hopelessness. Death itself becomes triumphant life. Death becomes the bright dawn of the mystical Day.