St. Through the temporal, the Church unites us with eternity. It leads each of us along his life's path, at the end of which he must receive "eternal rest in the blessed dormition" and enter the eternal memory of God.

Let us approach the divine service with great attention and reverence, and enter it not as spectators or witnesses, but as its participants. Then our whole life will receive a new meaning and a new illumination. Truly living in divine services, we can already have "eternal rest" here on earth, we can be worthy that the Lord will have us in His eternal memory even in the days of our earthly life.

It is our great happiness that we are once again entering the annual cycle of divine services and have the opportunity to go through it once again with the whole world. And our task is to make each year of life sent to us by the Lord truly a time of communion with eternity, an entry into that which, through God's infinite love, was accomplished "for our sake and for our salvation."

2. The Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit!

A few days ago, by the mercy of God, we entered the New Church Year, and now we celebrate the first great feast of the annual liturgical cycle, the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos.

In order to understand the meaning of this feast, and with it the other feasts of the Church, we must first of all remember that Church life is a mystery incomprehensible to those who are outside the Church.

It is no accident that the most important thing in the life of the Holy Church is Her center, through which we become partakers of the grace of God, we call T A I N S T V A M I.

We ourselves, with our created minds, could not comprehend this mystery of the Church. But the Lord, in His mercy, gradually reveals it to those who live in the Sacraments, who fall down to this source of grace and drink its living water.

There are many mysteries in the life of the Church, but one of them is constantly revealed to the faithful. We enter into communion with her, and not only when we receive grace-filled gifts through the Sacraments, but whenever we are in church and participate in divine services.

However, for many of us, believers, this mystery continues to remain closed. In order to truly come into contact with it, we need to be not mere listeners and spectators of what is happening in church, but to enter into the experience of those who were the creators of the divine services and imprinted it in the prayers and hymns they composed, beginning with the time of the Apostles, through the martyrs and monks, and ending with the ascetics of our time.

The creators of the divine services, in full agreement with all the fathers and teachers of the Church, tell us that man was created for eternal life, that the true element, in which alone his soul can live, is eternity.

When we bury our departed and pray for the repose of their souls, we ask the Lord to grant them "eternal memory." But this prayer can also apply to us who are still living on earth, because we also need the Lord to have us in His eternal memory: after all, the goal of our life is communion with eternity. Therefore, the best and most valuable wish of the Church is the wish of eternal memory.

And we constantly forget about it. Burdened with worldly cares and overshadowed by the temporal circumstances of our life, we forget about what we were created for, we forget about eternity, in which only that which was created by the Lord – VIRTUE – lives.