St. Demetrius Saturday always falls on the nearest Saturday before November 8 – the day of remembrance of the Holy Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessaloniki
Augustine Sokolovski, Doctor of Theology, priest
In our collective imagination, God appears to be very old. This corresponds to the icon of the so-called New Testament Trinity, where the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is blessed by God sitting on the royal throne, represented in the form of an old man. Moreover, it is on this icon that the “old age of God” is emphasized especially clearly.
In the Bible, God is called the “Ancient of Days”. “As I looked, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire”, – it is written in the book of the prophet Daniel (Dan.7:9).
Metaphysics echoes this generally accepted notion of God’s absolute old age. At the same time, it goes its own ways. The God of philosophy is inaccessible to man. He is invisible, incomprehensible. He is not limited by anything. These are the basic principles from which any seminarian begins the study of dogma.
At the same time, in the light of 21st century theology, it is obvious to us that all these extremely lofty definitions of God are one-sided. They only act in one direction. They only apply to us humans. After all, we are limited and mortal. God, in Christ Jesus, makes Himself accessible and limited. According to one of the medieval theologians, He took over all of ours and gave us all of His own. In the Eucharist we partake of this mystery.
“Our years are counted like a spider’s web; our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away,” says the Psalms (Ps.89.10). It is generally believed that over the years a person becomes wiser, his behaviour and morals become better. Suffering and illness ennoble and teach understanding. At the biblical level of understanding, these words may be true.
But at the level of everyday life, they turn out to be generally accepted stereotypes that are refuted by reality itself. Over the years, a person becomes embittered. His habits are cemented by experience. In old age, only relatives can truly love a person. In this sense, the “prophet of secularity” Steve Jobs was right when, in his Stanford speech in June 2005, he argued that the limitation of a person’s life to time is, in fact, a boon for others.
New Testament thinking allows us to agree with this, and, at the same time, to think further and deeper. We are used to seeing God as older than us. In popular piety, He was represented as an old man for centuries and even millennia. This perception can be helpful, but it can also be harmful. Because it hides the true meaning of things from us.
“I fell in love with You too late, Beauty, so ancient and so young, I fell in love with You too late,” St. Augustine (354-430) writes about God. To this ancient thinker, who was bishop of the North African Carthaginian Church, the history of philosophy attributes the invention of the very thought of time. Talking about time and the temporality of man, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, the modern Algerian city of Annaba, turns to the thought of God and argues that, among all living beings, He is the youngest. God is young, He is young and renews being. He is younger than any of us and younger than anything in the world.
This paradoxical statement of theological thought reveals many meanings. It turns out that there is a godlike quality in genuine youth. It is present in the desire to learn, in the idealism and romanticism of perceiving ordinary things. The willingness to selflessly change this world for the better was the inspiration of the saints. Faith manifested itself in them in the ability to constantly create themselves anew for the benefit of others. “Reverence for life,” as Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) once wrote. This wonderful youth of God was inspired by the ancient saints, whom the Church remembers in these autumn, recent times.
November Commemoration of the Departed and All Saints’ Day
In Orthodox popular piety, “parental Saturdays” are called Saturdays of universal commemoration of the dead. These days, the Church prays exclusively for all those for whom there is no one to pray and whom there is no one to remember. This is the original purpose of such commemoration days, of which there are only five in the Orthodox Tradition: on the Saturday before the day of Holy Pentecost, a week before the beginning of Lent, as well as on the second, third and fourth Saturdays of Lent. In the Russian Orthodox Church, another memorial Saturday in November was added to these days of commemoration in ancient times.
Tradition connects the appearance of this additional commemoration day in the Russian Orthodox liturgical calendar with the Battle of Kulikovo. This event took place on the Nativity of the Theotokos, September 8, 1380. It marked the beginning of a genuine “Eastern Orthodox Reconquista” – the return of the native Orthodox countries from the rule of the Mongol conquerors, about which, unlike the European Reconquista in the Pyrenees, unfortunately, much less is known in the mass consciousness. Paradoxically, it was the Russians, and, almost simultaneously, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who became the only peoples in history who in the Middle Ages managed to return the lands captured by pagan and Muslim empires and reassemble them under Christian rule.
According to legend, Prince of Moscow Dmitry Donskoy (1350–1389) then asked St. Sergius of Radonezh (1322–1392) to make a prayer commemoration of all those who fell in battle 40 days after its end. This is an Orthodox Christian custom, since forty is a biblical sacred number, which is a symbol of fullness, and, at the same time, wandering and transition.
At the same time, some researchers believe that some ancient Proto-Slavic tradition of commemoration of the dead, which existed in the early November days, could have been at the origins of this autumn commemoration. Both of these explanations do not contradict but complement each other.
So, the November commemoration is laid on the Saturday before the Memorial Day of the Holy Great Martyr Demetrius of Thessaloniki (November 8), and therefore in honour of this saint it is called the “St. Demetrius Memorial Saturday”. The memory of St. Demetrius falls on the same day, whereas the first Saturday in November always falls on different dates. Therefore, this Saturday of commemoration is a transitional celebration. By the way, during the years of Soviet rule, this commemoration Saturday seemed to randomly approach, and sometimes even coincide with the main Bolshevik celebration in honour of the Revolution on November 7. This caused an almost metaphysical fear of the authorities, who then stood on the positions of official atheism. The older generation of believers testifies to tacit attempts to postpone or even cancel this commemoration, since the mass presence of people in churches on the very eve of the communist celebration was clear evidence that faith in God was not defeated by atheists at all.
In 2024, the St. Demetrius Parental Saturday falls on November 2. This date is a remarkable coincidence, since it is on this day that Western Christians celebrate the day of all the departed faithful from year to year according to ancient tradition. In some countries, such commemoration has “shifted” to November 1, All Saints’ Day, which, from the point of view of the Church’s worship, is of course wrong. After all, the celebration in honour of All Saints is exclusively festive, whereas the commemoration of the dead is a mournful, prayerful and penitential memory.
It turns out that the St. Demetrius Saturday is indeed an analogue of the funeral commemoration of all the departed faithful in the Western tradition. It is hardly possible to trace the mutual dependence of the two memorial days, but the fact that the St. Demetrius Saturday could be established in the calendar precisely due to the practice already existing among Western Christians of commemorating the dead in early November is a possible theological explanation for the persistency of this tradition among the Orthodox people and in the liturgy. Non-religious, secular and everyday things often have truly theological tectonics!
During the general commemoration of the departed, the Church primarily prays for those who are no longer commemorated by name. Over time, this original meaning of universal commemoration began to be lost. Believers, who were kept from constantly visiting the temple by daily worries, as well as the circumstances of the time, as it was in the Soviet era, began to remember their parents and relatives especially on these days. Therefore, commemoration became by name, and the universal Saturdays received the name “parental”.
“I await the resurrection of the dead,” the Church says in its prayer through the mouth of the Creed. The Church is waiting for the resurrection of the dead. Prayer for the dead allows us to believe and hope that the dead will rise in glory. Other Creeds of the Patristic era express this belief in universal resurrection more specifically: “I believe in the resurrection of the flesh,” the Apostolic Symbol literally says.
Faith in the universal bodily resurrection is a dogma of faith, as important and necessary for expressing the essence of the Christian faith as the dogma of the Trinity or faith in the divinity of Christ. It is based on the preaching of the bodily resurrection from the dead of the Lord Himself.
As for the Christian attitude towards the memory of death, the lives of some saints are particularly instructive. “He who has acquired the memory of death can never sin,” says the biblical book of Wisdom of Sirach (Sir.7:39). According to the ancient ascetics, this was an important, constant spiritual exercise, and, most importantly, a virtue.
Modernity, which is facilitated by the unspeakable weakening of human thought and the possible influence of non-Christian Far Eastern religions, is characterized by a perception in which death appears to be getting rid of all evil, negative and accumulated, a kind of positive liberation. Here lies a contradiction to the biblical worldview. Life is blessed, and being is blessed. Life is good. The Lord Jesus Christ lived a life, human and earthly.
“I say that I will drink new wine with you in My Father’s kingdom,” He told His disciples before His Suffering and predicted His Resurrection (Matthew 26:29). Jesus visited and blessed the marriage in Cana of Galilee and turned water into wine there (John 2:1–11). According to Scripture and Tradition, Jesus’ earthly life did not last long. Faith in the Second Coming of the Lord gives us the audacity to assume that Jesus misses this earthly life in some truly biblical, inexpressible way.
Life is the opposite of death. In death, what once happened to the first people in the fall happens again and is reproduced. The dying person loses everything, the biography ends, the remnants of health, physicality disappear. God’s great temporary gifts are also disappearing. Evil and malice are related to death, they are, according to the word of the Apocalypse (Rev. 20:14), can torment a person forever. To avoid such a fate, man, in Christ Jesus, needs Redemption. God not only accepts the repentance of those who, after much negligence, want to be corrected, but grants the grace of holiness. Therefore, the day of commemoration of the dead and the memory of saints, as in the case of the Great Martyr Demetrius, or, more globally and symbolically, the Feast of All Saints, are combined in the calendar.
The beginning of Christmas time
If the St. Demetrius Parental Saturday is an Orthodox analogue of the universal commemoration of the departed in the first days of November existing in the Western Christian tradition, then the beginning of the Christmas period, Advent, in Orthodoxy marks a celebration in honour of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple (December 4 (November 21). The worship of the great holidays is such that a careful reading of its texts can refresh in memory many of the most important elements of the entire Sacred History, to give moral guidance, and even teach theology.
Thus, celebrating the event of the Entry of Mary into the Temple, we recall that Abraham, whom the Apostle Paul calls the “father of believers” in Galatians (Gal.3:7), and his wife Sarah were infertile for a long time. “I will bless her and give you a son by her; and I will bless her, and nations will come from her, and kings of nations will come from her” (Gen. 17:16). God made a promise but was slow to fulfil it.
In the light of the feast of the Presentation, it becomes obvious that what happened then was not only a historical event, but also a prophecy of what would happen to the parents of the Blessed Virgin. In gratitude to God, the Mother of God’s parents, Joachim and Anna, dedicated their Child to God. The theme of infertility and its resolution is revealed with special force in the event of the Nativity of the Virgin, and on the Feast of the Introduction, the idea of dedication becomes the main one. From early childhood, Virgo was dedicated to God. It fulfilled the key idea for the Old Testament Biblical people about the meaning of human existence, as faithfulness in the dedication of the Covenant.
The moral application of the holiday in Christian history has proved inexhaustible. Thus, in the era of the most important disputes in the history of Orthodoxy about the vision of God, St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1357) spoke about the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple and Her stay at the shrine, as a time of incessant prayer. Staying in the temple is important in itself, but through active prayer invocation of God, grace gives a person its life-giving power.
Finally, the dogmatic meaning of the Entry into the Temple reminds us that with the coming of the Son of God into the world, the hearts of believers will become the true temple of God. “The time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,” says the Lord in the Gospel (John 4:21). With the entry of Mary on the threshold of the House of God, the time of farewell to the Temple begins.
The memory of Saint Spyridon of Cyprus and Christmas
On the day when the Western Christian world and the Orthodox Churches following the Gregorian calendar celebrate Christmas on December 25, our Church continues its journey through the ways of the Nativity Fast. In order that this path may not be traversed alone, the Lord sends us his saints as companions, whose memory is celebrated on these holy preparatory days. Among them is Spyridon of Tremithus (270–345), whose memory is celebrated on this extraordinary day of the “Western Christmas”.
Saint Spyridon was a contemporary of Nicholas of Myra (270–343). However, the Mediterranean Sea lay between them. For Spyridon was a Cypriot, and Nicholas a Lycian – a native of the ancient region, once a glorious country called Lycia with its capital in the city of Myra. Both breathed the words of the Apocalypse about a New Heaven and a New Earth, “where there is no sea anymore” (cf.Rev.21:1). Both were born in the second half of the third century, survived the Era of Persecution, and undoubtedly were confessors of the most terrible of them – the Great Persecution under Diocletian (284–305) and his successors.
In order to understand at least a little who these people were, we, who have reached the “age of reason”, should remember our front-line soldiers who passed the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). Those who were captured or tortured in camps but survived. They were special people, as if made of a different dough, or better, of iron. They didn’t talk much, especially about the past. The more their memories are unique.
Church historians of antiquity have preserved for us the episode when Emperor Constantine the Great (+337) met with bishops who had survived persecution at the Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 325. When he saw them in great numbers – one of these confessors had his eye gouged out, another had his arm cut off, or there was a brand on his body – he shed tears. The autokrator, who knew no mercy, the victor and the monarch, who postponed baptism until his death in order to administer justice and execute enemies, as his contemporaries remember, could not hold back tears.
In the Roman Empire of the IV–V centuries, which stretched from modern England and Spain to Algeria and Morocco, there were about two thousand Orthodox bishops. Their dioceses were not equal in importance. So, the diocese of St. Augustine, the port of Hppo Regius, was in this unspoken table of ranks somewhere in the middle, between the first and second thousand. The diocese of Spyridon… was one of the last.
He was the bishop of a small settlement, most likely, as was the case in ancient times, a chorbishop, that is, literally, a ‘rural bishop’. As it was allowed by the church canons of that time, he was a family man, had a wife and children. The life preserved the name of one of his daughters: ‘Irene’. At that time, temples were erected in honour of “Saint Irene”. But they did not mean any particular saint, but, like Wisdom – Sophia, one of the most important biblical names of God (cf. Eph. 2:14), translated from Greek meaning “Peace”. “For He is our peace, who made one of both and destroyed the barrier that stood in the middle,” Paul writes about Christ (cf. Eph. 2:14). Spyridon was a Man of Peace, and therefore a Friend of God. According to the biblical triad defining faith, he “believed in God, believed in God, followed Him.”
“God, Who was before time, became a man in time in order to free us from time,” wrote St. Augustine. Spyridon lived in such a way that these words were fulfilled over him. He did not seek fame, he wanted to be forgotten. While his heart was beating here on earth, he was striving to do good to those near and far, as commanded in the Scriptures and ss evidenced by his life. Free from time, he is filled with the grace of intercession for people. According to Paul, grace is freedom (2 Cor. 3:17). Saint Spyridon, in these last days of the year, is doing good to us now on the day of his memory, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit we can be freed from the adversities of this changeable time.
