Feast of the Healing Spring at the Romanian Patriarchate
April 2014
On 25 April 2014, the Orthodox Church celebrated the feast of the Healing Spring. After the Divine Liturgy, His Beatitude Daniel, Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church celebrated, at the Patriarchal Cathedral, the blessing service of the water, also called little holy water.
To end with the water blessing service, the Patriarch of Romania delivered a sermon in which he showed that the Mother of God is Life bearing spring through the grace of Jesus Christ, our Lord: “Today’s Matins’ chants show that the Mother of God is a Spring of life and healing. More exactly, the Mother of God is a Life bearing spring. Therefore, the Mother of God is the one who gave birth to the Word-the-Man or Eternal Son of God. But because the Mother of God is full of grace she becomes a Life bearing spring as good health, as healing. Whenever our good health is faced with disease, life is diminished, mixed with sufferance and pain, but healing restores the good health of life and so, life gets back to its normal state. Thus, the Mother of God is a Life bearing spring because she had Christ in her womb first, and then in her arms and now she fully bears the grace of Christ and becomes a healer through the power of Christ’s grace”.
His Beatitude has also shown that the gift of life is from God, and our duty is to protect, cultivate and deify it: “We often do not receive the healing of our body’s diseases right away, but if we repent, pray a lot and use the holy water we are first healed from the spiritual diseases, namely from sins. Often, but not always, the body’s diseases are the consequences of sin. On the other hand, the diseases remind us that life is a gift of God, that it is not our own gift. It is a gift of God that we must protect, cultivate and deify. The time of the earthly life is the time of the deification of the gift of life. It does not matter if we live a long or short life in the world, but how we live it, if we have deified the gift of life or not”.
Today, a new priest of the Russian speaking Orthodox community of Bucharest celebrated at the Patriarchal Cathedral. To end with the water blessing religious service, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel introduced rev Mihail Asmus. The Russian Orthodox faithful of Bucharest attend the religious services of Nicolae Tabacu church situated in Calea Victoriei St.
“We are glad because he wanted to be present here today. He asked for our blessing to celebrate together with our priests and we ask him to convey our brotherly greetings to His Beatitude Patriarch Kiril”, His Beatitude said.
In the end, the faithful present could have holy water for them and for their dear ones and received small icons of the feast of the Healing Spring on behalf of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel.
The water blessed at the Patriarchal Cathedral was brought from the spring of the Mother of God situated in the park of the Patriarchal Residence.
