The Dormition Fast begins with the feast of the Procession of the Honourable Cross, a Constantinopolitan office for taking a fragment of the True Cross processionally through the neighbourhoods of the City each day until the feast of the Dormition. It was the high season of contagious diseases in the hot, humid eastern Mediterranean Summer, and Constatinopolitans poured out into the streets to share in the purification of the air, praying to be either delivered or preserved from illnesses.

The other side of the feast has to do with the inauguration of a fast which, on Mount Athos and undoubtedly in the many equally great, now-vanished monastic centres of the world of New Rome, is taken as seriously and observed as intensely as is the Holy Forty Day fast before Pascha. And of course no fast - no effort involving ascetic struggle - is possible without that personal self denial which is the unique gateway to the Cross of the Saviour.

August was always - as it is today - a season of intense labours in the agriculturally-based empire of the New Romans. Long as the days are, there is never enough time to finish the work of the day and the level of physical exhaustion for the great majority of the New Romans was high. And yet, coming just at the centre of these hard months is this great 15 day fast. The surviving literature from the period attests to the seriousness with which all parts of society fasted and prayed, certainly inspired by the ubiquitous figures of the monks and nuns living everywhere across the face of the empire of the New Rome.

With all the well-known and glaring defects of that Christian civilisation, with all its short-comings and outbursts of heresy and violence and the sinful betrayal of the Gospel, the Church still provided the calendar of a structure of life which kept the incarnate Logos in full public view, and at prime focus. The great public processions that constitute so striking a feature of the liturgical experience of the early Church, beginning at Jerusalem, and which have been virtually ruled out today by an increasingly-strident secularism that stifles the Church's public role and her visibility, those great processions were indeed the popular rallies that kept the faith so vibrantly a part of the populist Christian culture of the eastern Mediterranean.

The fragment of the True Cross, moving solemnly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, stopping at the great squares of the City for special litanies, purified more than the fetid air of an August Constantinople. Through the rite, the nation itself prostrated in prayer before the All-Holy Trinity and referred itself forward to Christ as the central figure in the human saga.

And here on the southern flanks of a small mountain in Northern California we, too, "clear the air" for the beginning of another fast, another time of opportunity, to redress the wrongs of the inner man, to repent of those things that tend to go off so long as we are alive in space and time, to let go of all things corruptible and corrupting - to let the dead bury their own dead - and, relieved of darkness and the stink of death pervading life on earth, to find again in Christ that blinding light in which we see never so clearly, in Whom already we find the fragrance of eternal life.

Like most of the people living in the Christian empire of the New Romans, this Brotherhood is also for the most part an agricultural work-force, struggling not only with the usual round of tasks every day of the long growing season but coping this year with an unusually-long heat wave that has sapped our strength and left us very worn down. And yet, no matter how much fatigue we bring to the Vigil for the feasts of the season, we are always remarking how quickly we are revived and provisioned with stamina aplenty to accomplish what must be done.

The Vigil for the Procession of the Cross could not be simpler and is shorter than most, a mercy under the circumstances. As in past years, everyone left after its final words last night, renewed for the great engagement of self-denying love that has been laid out by the office as the main matter to be considered until the fast is done.

This morning's liturgy began early - still in darkness - and after its communion, we blessed water and then, after blessing the Monastery itself with the new holy water, carried it out into the fields and gardens and orchards that we have started - all growing organically - and which are now in their second and third year - and blessed them and the work of our hands.

And what might seem to be somewhat odd - a fast in the midst of the season of hard, physical work - becomes another gift of the liturgical calendar, another joyous excursion during the slow unfolding of the Christian year. Everything is filled with the spirit of thanksgiving for all things and the sanctification of the time of our lives.