Right in the middle of the Nativity fast, we get to experience the miraculous feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple. The world awaited its arrival for five thousand years since the fall of man. At long last, the fallen world witnessed Her arrival in their midst. Due to personal acts of faith, purity, and innocence, She was able to enter the holy of holies and thus lead mankind into the Church. 

The feast is especially memorable for the Seraphim-Diveyevo monastery. A month ago, the monastery celebrated the consecration of the altar to the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple and now its patronal feast was marked for the first time today. 

On the eve of the Entrance of the Mother of God, young Prokhor Moshnin, future Venerable Seraphim of Sarov, arrived at the Sarov monastery to become a monk. It happened in 1778. Forty-five years later, his favorite disciple Venerable Martha, or Maria Semenovna Milyukova, also entered into monastic life on the eve of this feast. In so doing, they as if presaged that the church is the school of virtue for us with all wise Lord a source of any true wisdom. 

“Seeing the entrance of the Pure One, the angels marvel in wonder,” is sung at today’s festal vigil service. Together with angels, we rejoice and are amazed by this wondrous event. This feast foreshadows how the Most Pure Virgin, like all of us by birth who bears the burden of the primeval sin as one of the mankind, would become the Most Honorable than the Cherubim and More Glorious than the Seraphim.