Relics and Feast

Sebastian’s relics were translated from the monastery of Žiča in Serbia to St. Sava’s church in Jackson, California, in 2007 — eight years before his glorification, not after it, an order the collection is careful to state accurately. His feast is kept on November 30, the day of his repose; the date carries the usual Old-Style / New-Style considerations of the Serbian calendar.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox / American (glorified 2015)

The Translation of 2007

For sixty-seven years after his death, Sebastian’s body lay in the monastery cemetery at Žiča in Serbia, where St. Nikolai had buried him in 1940 (see The Last Years and Žiča). In 2007, his relics were disinterred and translated across the Atlantic to St. Sava’s Serbian Orthodox Church in Jackson, California — the very parish he had founded and consecrated in 1894, the mother church of Serbian Orthodoxy in America — where they were reinterred (Hieromonk Damascene [Christensen], Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich, St. Herman Press, on the 2007 translation; OrthodoxWiki, “Sebastian (Dabovich),” and the Tacoma parish Life, used as locators, giving 2007 for the return of the relics to Jackson). The apostle who had crossed the oceans some two dozen times in life made one last crossing in death, home to the people and the church he had gathered.

The Order of Events: Relics Before Glorification

It is important to state the chronology precisely, because it is easily and often garbled. The translation of the relics (2007) preceded the glorification (2015) by eight years; it did not follow it. This is the reverse of the more familiar pattern, in which a saint’s relics are uncovered and translated as part of or after the act of glorification. In Sebastian’s case the body was brought home to Jackson while he was still, canonically, the departed Archimandrite Sebastian — venerated and beloved, his cause gathering, but not yet glorified (OrthodoxWiki and the parish Lives, used as locators; the sequence is confirmed by every source that dates the translation to 2007 and the glorification to 2015). The brief that commissioned this collection rightly flagged the need to get this order right, and the answer is unambiguous: relics first (2007), glorification after (2015). The return of the relics was thus not the fruit of a completed canonization but one of the acts of veneration and homecoming that helped prepare and press it — the community reclaiming its founder’s body years before the Church formally proclaimed him a saint.

There is a certain fittingness in this order. It was the living devotion of the Serbian-American faithful — bringing their father home, tending his grave at Jackson, keeping his memory and his books — that carried Sebastian toward the diptychs, rather than a canonization descending from above upon a forgotten figure. The relics came home first because the people had never let him go; the glorification followed because the Church recognized what the people already knew (see The St. Herman Press Biography, on the living memory that sustained his cause).

The Feast of November 30

Sebastian’s feast is kept on November 30, the day of his repose in 1940, as fixed by the Holy Assembly of Bishops in 2015 (Serbian Orthodox Church, acts of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, May 2015, assigning Sebastian’s commemoration to November 30; see The Act of 2015). This is the ordinary Orthodox practice of commemorating a saint on the day of his death — his dies natalis, his birth into eternal life. On that day the Divine Liturgy is served in his honor and the proper hymnody — troparion and kontakion — is chanted, and his icon is set out for veneration (Serbian Church acts, May 2015).

The date carries the usual calendar considerations of the Serbian Church, which follows the Julian (Old) calendar for the fixed feasts. Sebastian’s repose was recorded as November 17/30 — November 17 Old Style, corresponding to November 30 New (civil) Style in the twentieth century (see The Last Years and Žiča). His feast is accordingly kept on November 17 on the Julian calendar, which in the present civil reckoning falls on December 13 (the Julian–Gregorian gap having grown to thirteen days). Readers should therefore expect to see his commemoration announced on November 30 where the day is given in the saint’s own repose-reckoning and on December 13 where the current civil date of the Julian November 17 is meant — the same double dating that attends every fixed Serbian feast. The collection follows the sources in naming November 30 as his feast, noting only that this is the New-Style equivalent of the Old-Style November 17 of his repose (Serbian Church acts, May 2015; general Serbian calendar practice).

A Shrine at Jackson

The practical result of the 2007 translation and the 2015 glorification is that St. Sava’s, Jackson — already the oldest and first Serbian church of the hemisphere (see St. Sava’s, Jackson, 1894) — is now also the shrine of its own founder, holding the relics of the saint who built it. Few parishes anywhere possess so complete a symmetry: the man who consecrated the church in 1894 rests within it as its glorified patron-founder, his relics venerated where he once served the Liturgy. For the Serbian-American community and for the wider North American synaxis, Jackson has become a place of pilgrimage — the grave of the first American-born Orthodox priest-saint, in the first Serbian church of the New World (see American Orthodoxy’s Own Saints).

See Also

References

  • Damascene (Christensen), Hieromonk. Archimandrite Sebastian Dabovich: Serbian Orthodox Apostle to America. Platina, CA: St. Herman Press. (The 2007 translation of the relics from Žiča to Jackson.)
  • “Sebastian (Dabovich).” OrthodoxWiki — used as locator for the 2007 relic translation.
  • Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, Tacoma. “St. Sebastian (Dabovich).” orthodoxtacoma.com — used as locator for the 2007 translation to Jackson.
  • Serbian Orthodox Church. Acts of the Holy Assembly of Bishops, May 2015 (spc.rs; westsrbdio.org; eserbia.org) — assigning the feast of November 30 and the liturgical commemoration.