the dormition of the mother of god (15 august)

i love this feast, partly because i love mary and what she has done, but also i love it because it has no hallmark card associations, no protestant abasements such as the confusion that makes the feast of the incarnation jesus's birthday, complete with hats and cake and the happy birthday song. (if you know of such abuses, please don't tell me.) yet the feast has a lot of wonderful vagueness, since it is a celebration of an event that is quite mysterious and about which there has not been such doctrinal fighting as surround events in the life of our lord.

it is a little odd that fundamentalists so completely ignore mary. since the acceptance of the virgin birth as a historical fact is one of the first of the "fundamentals," one might expect some rather developed mariology coming out of geneva or grand rapids. but, to my knowledge, it has not happened. here is a link to the orthodox understanding of the feast.

a part of my practices for the feast concerns food, of course. i'm about to go to some friends' house for a domestic dormition feast, and i'm taking basil ice cream; basil because one of the traditions surrounding the end of the theotokos' life on earth is that her dormition, her falling to sleep, and whatever happened next, occured in a field of basil. our word basil is from the greek basileus, meaning king. our lady fell asleep in the field of the lord. (basil was also found growing over the remnants of the true cross found by helena, according to the legends of its finding.)

the readings for the feast are an interesting lot. the eastern lections tend to be metaphorical descriptions of the virgin; the western tend to suggest parallels between christ and his mother. what is wonderful about the whole lot of them, and about the feast in general, is that they celebrate that what happens to the christ, happens to his mother, as representative of the church, and therefore to all of us, but the exact details remain a bit of a mystery, something we shall discover "when we shall see him face to face."