August 15, 2025
Our Lady, the Most Holy Theotokos, lived the most perfect life of any mere human. Receiving our God into her womb, raising the very One who created her, Mary’s life is a prime example for us and for our own lives. She reveals how we are all to imitate the life of Christ, so that we may receive the very same Grace and the very same perfection. Of the 12 Great Feasts of the Church, a full third of them are dedicated to her and to her life. The first major feast of the Church Year is her Nativity, on September 8th, and the last major feast is her Holy Dormition, on August 15th. But what is a Dormition?
Dormition means ”repose” or “falling asleep”, and it is of great importance that we commemorate the Theotokos’s death. Mary did indeed die. She was not assumed into Heaven alive, but rather her body was taken up by Christ after her death. This distinction separates us from the Roman Catholic teaching, and we affirm the Theotokos’s repose as an integral part of her story, of her life. For the life of Mary is that of a human being. Yes, Jesus Christ is 100% human, but he is not merely human. So, when we look to Christ’s life and we seek to imitate it, it can perhaps be difficult to know where to begin, or how exactly to relate his life, death, and resurrection directly to us.
Knowing this, our Lord provides his own mother as a stalwart example for us. She is a person who lived and died, perfected throughout by a life in Christ. By dying, and by being received into Heaven, the Theotokos teaches us a fundamental Truth of our Faith: our own bodily Resurrection. Though we ourselves die, we hold firmly in Faith and Hope that death is no longer the End for us. Christ came not just to resurrect himself, but to raise us all from the dead. And that Resurrection is not merely spiritual. Christ still bears the mark of the nails, he resurrected wholly, in body and in spirit. And we are promised that same resurrection, that very same salvation from Death. In this way, the Theotokos’s Dormition serves as an icon of this reality.
Through the Prayers of the Most-Holy Theotokos, Savior save us!
