"Rejoice, fiery throne of the Lord God. Rejoice, the sacred vessel that is filled with manna."

"Rejoice, fiery throne of the Lord God. Rejoice, the sacred vessel that is filled with manna."

DORMITION AT THE BURNING BUSH*: 

The Most Celebrated Maiden in the World

Like families anywhere, monastic communities have their public and private challenges, and turn their best face to the world. Unstudied contentment reasserts its hold over the Sinai fortress each year however, as monastics converge on the Monastery from all directions, drawn back for the celebrations of the Dormition of the Theotokos from near or far flung hermitages throughout the Mediterranean world.

At the Cairo branch monastery that serves as transit hub for the desert, quietly reflecting on the buoyant air of anticipation, an old-time monk spoke for all, “Panagia gathers us in to her Feast.”

And in Athens, the courtyard of St. Catherine’s branch church fills on the holy day with all manner of self-proclaimed non-believers, atheists, and many of the afflicted who otherwise confine themselves to society’s peripheries.

Everyone knows where home is on the great Feast day of the Mother of God.

Well into his sixth decade of travelling by night and working by day in service to God and man, the Archbishop and Abbot of the Monastery may arrive last of all, just in time to enter Justinian’s great basilica for the start of the agrypnia, the all-night Liturgy in honor of the Feast. In more peaceful times, the church would be crowded with pilgrims, many of whom returned year after year. Most however reached Sinai after attending the Feast day services in Jerusalem at the empty tomb of the Theotokos in Gethsemane.

St. Catherine’s visitors typically categorize themselves as ‘pilgrim’ or ‘tourist’. Well-aware that mankind’s deepest longing is for God, monastics recognize the fallacy of such distinctions. All arrive here “hoping to experience the stillness that exists between the soul and God,” His Eminence Archbishop Damianos of Sinai has said. A hermit monk explains this is equally true whether expressed by exuberant hoots disturbing the night on the steps leading to the Holy Summit, or by anxiously searching for the entrance to the Monastery church in the same black night – hoping to arrive before the service begins, when the angels do.

Much has been made of the Sinai Monastery’s preservation of the precious artifacts of ancient Christianity, and also of the unbroken ages of its peaceful co-existence with neighbors in a non-Christian world.  

Less noted is that the Sinai represents the only center of ancient ascetic spirituality open to women – tourist, pilgrim, or monastic. In a sphere where women have often had to struggle to prove themselves much as in civilian life, female monasticism in Sinai dates from the third century, apparently to the inceptions of the current monastic community itself.

Naturally isolated by remote desert, ascetics seeking stillness never needed to fabricate a barrier to worldly civilization by sealing the Monastery off from visits by families. Of course such a step would never have been contemplated by the guardians of a holy pilgrimage of such literally Biblical proportions. By the time the world resolutely landed on their doorstep with the construction of asphalt roads and tourist infrastructure, Sinai monks had long accustomed themselves to a double burden: combining the rigors of eremitic life with hospitality to those seeking deeper understanding of God.

After all, the Holy Mountain capped by the Peak of the Decalogue – of the Ten Commandments – is the mountain of the knowledge of God. And the Burning Bush, which still thrives in the Monastery courtyard, the path to that knowledge – for it burned with the same fire of divine Wisdom that later shone forth upon all creation from the “Bush of the Holy Virgin.”

"Let us ever applaud and praise the Lord God

Who was seen of old on the holy mount in glory, Who by the fiery bush revealed the great mystery of the Ever-virgin and undefiled Maiden unto the Prophet Moses."

Aflame but not consumed by the fire of divinity just like the Bush itself, the Holy Virgin is the fiery pillar guiding the faithful through the darkness of this world’s trials. The Israelites were led through the Sinai by fire at night and a cloud by day, and the Holy Virgin spreads the protection of her shelter over the world more broadly than a cloud. Under it, her love gathers together not only the monastics of Sinai, but all the faithful who glorify her Son, the God-man who saves the world from sin as He saved His All-holy Mother from the corruption of death at her Dormition. ...

"The heavens were astonished and stood in awe, and the ends of the earth, Maid, were sore amazed, for God appeared bodily to mankind as very man. And behold, your womb has proved to be vaster and more spacious than heaven's heights. For this, O Theotokos, the choirs and assemblies  of men and angels magnify your name."

*For the complete article "Dormition at the Burning Bush", please go to the FMSM News Blog: http://www.mountsinaimonastery.org/news-blog/dormition2016