September
I’ve always loved September for its ushering in of fall, but I’ve come to love it even more since becoming Orthodox. I first started visiting an Orthodox parish for vespers every Saturday night starting in late summer one year. It became my favorite part of the week: standing in the candle-lit sanctuary surrounded by icons as the golden light of autumn faded into night and we sang “Gladsome Light.” Vespers in fall is especially lovely, but there is so much more I’ve come to love about September.
I love that the Church New Year starts September 1st. This is an ancient practice that allowed for people to plan for the next year during the harvest from the previous one. It’s also a time of gratitude as well as newness. I love having this new beginning at this time of year.
September is also the Feast of the Cross, one of my most favorite Church feasts. The hymns for this feast are so beautiful, and they have one of my very favorite lines in all of the Church’s hymnography “… for it was fitting that the wood should be healed by wood.” This line speaks to how the wound to humanity that came about through the wood from the tree in the Garden of Eden was healed through the wood of the Cross. This is such a rich thought that speaks so much to me about not only God’s goodness and mercy but also about His love of the poetic and beautiful. It also makes me feel so much hope during such a season of darkness, because it reminds me that my hope isn’t in a God who keeps anything from ever happening to me but in a God who can use the very things that wound me to also heal the deeper wounds in my soul. This always reminds me of one of my favorite bits of an old hymn I used to sing often:
““When through the deep waters I call thee to go, The rivers of sorrow shall not overflow; For I will be with thee, thy troubles to bless, And sanctify to thee thy deepest distress.””
Sometimes I feel disoriented in my faith and get overwhelmed by the bigness of what I believe. In those moments, I revisit the beautiful stories that reorient me and remind me of the goodness of God. I read of God appearing to Elijah in the gentle breeze (1 Kings 6) and God taking flesh through the Theotokos and becoming a tiny baby. I remind myself of the story in Micah of the mountain that people flocked to to learn God’s ways and “hammer their swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks” (Micah 4), turning instruments of violence and devastation into instruments of growth and cultivation. I come back to the Cross, the “Weapon of Peace”, and how Christ used an instrument of violence used against Him to heal the world. I need to remember always that our God is a God of transformations. The wounds of life and even death itself don’t have the final say. They’re not the end of the story. The end of the story is God Himself, and He is infinite and always offering us new beginnings.
