You gave birth yet preserved your virginity. You fell asleep in death yet did not desert the world, O Theotokos. You were transported to life, as you are Mother of Life and, by virtue of your intercessions, deliver our souls from death.
Apolytikion of the Feast
15 August 2025
My Dearly Beloved Children in the Lord,
Rightly and fittingly has the living Tradition of our Church given the name of “the Summer Pascha” to the Feast of the Dormition and the Assumption into the Heavens of our All-Holy Lady, the Panagia. It is this lived experience and this faith of our pious Orthodox people concerning the unique manner of the departure of our Lady the Theotokos that St. Germanos, Patriarch of Constantinople, captures when he says, “Just as Your Son and the God of all tasted in his flesh a death like Yours and just as He glorified His own life-giving tomb, so also He glorified Your tomb, which at Your Dormition received You, the Mother of Life. Both tombs received in reality something exceptional, both Your bodies, but they enacted no decay upon them. Because it was impossible that You, who were the vessel that contained God, would be dissolved into the dust of death. Since He who humbled Himself and was borne in Your womb was from the beginning God and pre-eternal Life, it was only fitting that You, also, who are the Mother of Life, would dwell together with Life itself, with Your Son, in the Heavens.”
In Her Dormition, My Dear Children in the Lord, our All-Holy Lady has not abandoned Her people, She has not left her children orphans. As the living and breathing Ark of the Lord, She ascends from the corrupt things of this world to the
Heavenly Jerusalem that is eternal and incorrupt. The Most Holy Theotokos, the living Palace of the Son and Logos of God the Father, has become the Ladder that raises us to Heaven, and therefore Her death is a passageway to immortality. Thus today we celebrate, not only the Dormition of the Theotokos, but also Her glorious Assumption. We believe that the tomb could not hold Her all-pure body. Our
All-Holy Lady died because, as a created being, she had to pay the debt that all humans must pay, namely death. But she was taken up because the Assumption was a sign of the incorruptible miracle, the pinnacle of the graces of the the Most Blessed Mother of God. In piety therefore let us bend the knee of our both our body and heart before Her sacred icon and let us entreat her for our salvation, for the end of all wars and the peace of the world. I wish you all many blessed years beneath the mighty shelter and protection of our Most Holy Mother.
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