The Feast of Feasts and Festival of Festivals, the Great and Holy Pascha, is drawing near and, with its arrival, we shall move to the new liturgical period of movable Feasts, the Pentecostal Period. During this fifty-day period we will open a new liturgical book, the Pentecostarion, and will celebrate a new set of wondrous Church Feasts and services, which bring out the essentials of our faith. Therefore, we need to consider what the meaning of the Christian Feasts and the right manner of their celebration is all about.

The Christian Feasts are primarily religious in character, but they also have social and anthropological implications. As religious events, they provide the occasion for offering worship to God in and through Christ, as well as studying the Divine Word and participating in the divine mysteries of salvation, which are consummated in Christ. This is why the gatherings for celebrating the Feasts always comprise the celebration of the Divine Eucharist, hearing and interpreting the Word of God and offering appropriate prayers.

The anthropological implications of keeping the Feasts comprise the supply of rest for the body and strength for the soul to any human person who participates in them by removing it from the attachment to earthly things and by guiding it to studying and understanding its spiritual existence and destiny. This is most eloquently brought out by the words of our Lord: “the Sabbath has been made for man” (Mark 2:27); in other words, the Feasts were appointed for the benefit of the soul and for the spiritual formation of the human existence. Through the Holy Feasts, then, we are exposed to the powers and blessings of salvation and the world to come and we are offered the opportunity to appropriate them more fully.

For the meaning and purpose of the Great and Holy Feast of Pascha and for the Feasts in general you can read an important text which I have translated into Modern Greek and English from the Kyriakodromion of the renowned Greek theologian of the 18th century Nikephoros Theotokes, Archbishop of Astrachan and Stauroupolis (1736-1800), which you will find in the April Forerunner. For more on Feasts, movable and immovable and for those we observe during Pentecostal Period, you may like to read my book, Ecclesiasticus II: Orthodox Icons, Saints, Feasts and Prayer, published by the Orthodox Research Institute, Rollinsford, New Hampshire 2005, available from our Church and the Institute.

Wishing you a Blessed Pascha and Pentecostal Period, I thank you for all that you do for our historic parish of St. John the Baptist and our Holy Metropolis of Boston.

Fr. George Dion. Dragas, PhD, DD, DTh.