Leavetaking of Pascha / Forefeast of Ascension

Saints commemorated

• St Cyril of Alexandria

  Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376 – 444) was Archbishop of Alexandria and the greatest of the Church's Christological doctors — the "Seal of the Fathers," whose defence of the unity of the person of Christ gave the Church her language for the mystery of God made man. As president of the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus in 431, he led the condemnation of Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, who by dividing Christ into two subjects had refused to the Virgin the title Theotokos, "she who gave birth to God." Against him Cyril taught the hypostatic union: that the eternal Word of God, without ceasing to be God, truly made human flesh and a human soul his own, so that the one who was born of Mary, suffered, and rose is one and the same Son — God the Word incarnate — and Mary is therefore in all truth the Mother of God. His writings — the letters to Nestorius, the treatise On the Unity of Christ, the commentaries on John and Luke — became the charter of Orthodox Christology, honoured at Chalcedon and by the whole Church, Eastern and Oriental alike. He reposed at Alexandria on June 27, 444. His own feast is June 9; he is kept again on January 18 with Athanasius the Great, the two hierarchs of Alexandria, and on June 9.

• Ven. Kirill of Belozersk

  Cyril of White Lake (1337–1427) is the greatest of the founders of the "Northern Thebaid" and, after Sergius of Radonezh, the most influential monastic father of medieval Russia. A Moscow orphan raised in the household of a boyar at the court of Demetrius Donskoy, he was tonsured at the Simonov monastery, served nine years in its bakery under obedience, was made archimandrite in 1388 and laid the office down almost at once for the sake of silence. At sixty, following a voice heard while he read the Akathist before an icon of the Mother of God, he went north with Therapon into the forests of Beloozero and dug a cell in the ground above Siversk Lake. There grew the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery, the strictest and most learned house in Russia, whose rule of absolute non-possession — Cyril refused an offered estate outright — became the seed of the "non-possessor" tradition that Nilus of Sora carried forward a century later. He reposed at ninety on June 9, 1427, the feast of his patron Cyril of Alexandria.

• St Columba of Iona (597)

  Columba (521–597) — Colum Cille, "the dove of the church" — is with Patrick and Brigid one of the three patrons of Ireland, and the enlightener of the Picts of Scotland. A prince of the Cenél Conaill of the northern Uí Néill, trained under Finnian of Clonard and Mobhí of Glasnevin, he founded Derry and Durrow and many houses besides before a quarrel over a copied psalter drew him and his kin into the bloodshed of Cúl Dreimhne (561); for penance he undertook the peregrinatio pro Christo, and in 563 sailed with twelve companions to the small island of Iona off the coast of Dál Riata, from which Ireland could not be seen. From there for thirty-four years he preached to the Picts of the north, went up the Great Glen to the fortress of King Bridei son of Maelchon, arbitrated the affairs of kings at the Convention of Druim Cett, and ruled a family of monasteries whose abbots for a century carried Christianity through Scotland and into northern England. He reposed before the altar at Matins on June 9, 597, in his seventy-sixth year, and his life was written a hundred years later by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona, in one of the great books of the early medieval West.

• Alexander of Kushta

  Alexander of Kushta (c. 1371–1439) was one of the founders of the monastic wilderness of the Vologda north. Tonsured on the island monastery of the Saviour on the Stone in Lake Kubenskoye under Dionysius the Greek, the Athonite who brought the Holy Mountain's rule to the Russian north, he was ordained hieromonk and then fled his own monastery by night because the brethren had begun to revere him. He lived first in the forest on the river Syanzhema, then exchanged cells with the hermit Euthymius and settled at the mouth of the Kushta on the southern shore of Lake Kubenskoye, some forty versts from Vologda. When a third monk joined him he built a church of the Dormition of the Theotokos, receiving the blessing for it from the Archbishop of Rostov — his own former abbot. He met a Tatar raiding party with the cross in his hands, blessed a thief's stolen grain so that he could carry it, and reposed on June 9, 1439, in his sixty-eighth year; a rowan tree grew over his grave, and healings were recorded there.

• Five Virgin-Martyrs of Persia

  The five holy virgins Thecla, Mariamne, Martha, Mary and Ennatha were consecrated women of the Church in Persia, living near the village of Aza, who were put to death about the year 346 in the long persecution of Shapur II. Their story is remembered chiefly for the terrible part played in it by their own spiritual father, the priest Paul, to whom they had entrusted their goods: when the persecutors demanded of them apostasy and of him the treasure, Paul saved his money by conforming to the religion of the Persians, and — the synaxarion says — cut off with his own hand the heads of the five women who refused to follow him. His gain lasted a day: the Persians killed him the following evening and took everything he had. The virgins are honoured as martyrs and their betrayer as a warning, and the Church has kept them together in one memory since antiquity.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Baithene of Tiree (600)
• St. Cummian (8th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings