The Dormition is one of the twelve major Feasts of the Church. It is celebrated on August 15 according to the Old Calendar, i.e., on August 28 on the New Calendar. Preceding the Feast is a strict Dormition Fast, which begins on August 1/14 and lasts for two weeks.
The Holy Bible contains no mention of the Dormition of the Mother of God. However, accounts of that event have been preserved for us in Church Tradition and are expressed both in the Icon of the Feast and in the Church Service for the Feast.
Why, instead of mourning on the day of the Theotokos’ death, do we celebrate the event? Because, as the word “dormition” shows us, the death of the Mother of God was an unusual one; it was like unto a brief slumber, followed by birth into life eternal.
Everyone fears death, or to be more precise, is afraid to contemplate it (people experience the actual moment of death in a variety of ways). This is understandable. For man, death is something unnatural. In creating the first people, God did so not that they should die; death became the province of all mankind after man’s Fall into sin. According to the Gospels, Jesus Christ also experienced great spiritual suffering, “was troubled unto death,” before His Crucifixion. It was precisely to save man from death that the Son of God b Incarnate. He followed man’s entire path from beginning to end, and after His death, with His Soul descended into Hades and destroyed it.
After the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, death ceased to be a departure into the darkness of oblivion. For a person who believes in Christ, death becomes the mystery of birth into new life. All who die, i.e., all who fall asleep, await their resurrection from the dead, which will happen at the Christ’s Second Coming. The death of the Mother of God set an example—of the profound experience of a Christian death as a Mystery of translation to a new life and meeting with the Lord.
The Holy Church strives to instill in us as well that same kind of dispassion with respect to death and refers to the deceased as “those who have fallen asleep.” For Christians, the fact that there is to be a blessed life with God, with the Theotokos, with the Saints and with our loved ones is such a certainty that they truly look at death as merely a slumber.
In certain European countries—Holland, France, and others—August 15, the day of the Dormition of the Mother of God, is not a work day, but rather, an official national holiday.
