Tag Archives: Virgin Mary

Flowers and Love for This Mother

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My Favorite Rockrose

I have loving gifts and greetings from my dear children all around me today, though I didn’t have any of them present in the flesh. My husband’s taking me out to dinner soon to celebrate — and this morning it was wonderful to be in church, and hear a homily about the Samaritan woman, whose heart was open to Christ and who became a missionary of the gospel.

Cerinthe grows like a weed.

After the Agape Meal that we always have after the service, we heard a guest speaker, a priest who helped translate a recent book about Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos, who reposed in the Lord in the 1990’s.

One thing Father Peter said that impressed me was about the different perspective that an Orthodox ethos gives a person. He said that in Greece, for example, where people are raised with this background, even if they are not currently living out a Christian faith, they may unselfconsciously have Christian ideas about some things.

Bearded Iris

Modesty, for example. Here in the United States, the concept of modesty carries for many people connotations of old-fashioned or conservative, but when someone raised in a culture infused by the church thinks of modesty, he thinks immediately of Christ’s mother, the Theotokos — a person, and not a concept. What a blessing God gave me in this word on Mother’s Day!

Before church, and afterward, I couldn’t help but stop to take pictures of the flowers that I no longer have the job of caring for. Pearl sent me a vase of flowers for Mother’s Day, which I have on the table nearby, and God gave me these as well, just a few examples for today of the beautiful gifts he has given me my whole life through, including that of the experience of motherhood, the gifts of five children, and soon-to-be eleven grandchildren. What can I say about this except that it is astounding?

A (probably belated) blessed Mother’s Day to all of you!

Annunciation

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Today is the beginning of our salvation,
And the revelation of
the eternal mystery!
The Son of God becomes
the Son of the Virgin
As Gabriel announces
the coming of Grace.
Together with him let us cry
to the Theotokos:
“Rejoice, O Full of Grace,

the Lord is with you!”

The announcement by the Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the Christ, the Son of God, is one of the twelve Great Feasts of the church year in Orthodoxy, and is celebrated exactly nine months before the celebration of the birth of the Christ Child, on March 25th. The words above are from a hymn that we sing on this feast.

Not long ago I read The Presence of Mary, a booklet by Fr. Alexander Schmemann in the St. Athanasius Study Series, published by Conciliar Press © 1988. In 26 pages the author discusses in depth the role of Christ’s mother in our salvation history, and sets it against “…the fundamental spiritual disease of our time [that] must be termed anthropological heresy.”

That last clause piqued my interest, too! I’ve been wanting to take the time to read the booklet again and write a real review about the truths that Fr. Schmemann helps to clarify, but that time is not now. However, the present moment and celebration does seem to be right for at least posting a quote from the book, as we contemplate her who is “blessed among women”:

“It is clear that an abstract and impersonal study of man posits a self-evident conclusion: man as total dependence. An equally abstract exaltation of man posits its a priori premise: man as total freedom. But both are revealed in the unique personal experience of Mary, an experience given to the Church and made into her experience, as one and the same truth about man.

“In Mary, the very notions of ‘dependence’ and ‘freedom’ cease to be opposed to one another as mutually exclusive. We are inclined to think that where there is dependence there can be no freedom, where there is freedom there can be no dependence. Mary, however, accepts, she obeys, she humbles herself before the living Truth itself, a Presence, a Beauty, a Life, a Call so overwhelmingly evident that it makes the notion of ‘dependence’ an empty one — or rather identical and coextensive with that of freedom. For as long as freedom is nothing but the other side of dependence — a protest, a rebellion against dependence — as long as freedom itself depends on dependence for its meaning, it is also an empty notion. Each time freedom chooses and accepts, it ceases to be freedom. Here, however, in the unique experience of Mary, freedom becomes the very content of dependence, the one eternally fulfilling itself in the other as life, joy, knowledge, communion, and fulness.

“Admittedly these are poor, inadequate, and clumsy human words about an experience, a vision, a reality which transcends all human words. But, having read them, look again at that woman who eternally stands at the very heart of the Church filling our hearts with a mysterious yet ineffable joy, making us repeat eternally that same salutation which she heard in the depth of her heart on the day of Annunciation: Rejoice!”

-Father Alexander Schmemann

(Icon by Mikhail Nesterov)

That Temple You Are

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We have begun the celebration of the Feast of the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple, focusing on an event that is not mentioned in the Bible, but is a story with important meaning.

As Fr. Thomas Hopko explains in The Winter Pascha, “Its purpose is not so much to commemorate an historical happening as to celebrate a dogmatic mystery of the Christian faith, namely, that every human being is made to be a living temple of God.

“The festal event is that the three-year-old Mary, in fulfillment of a promise made at her conception by her parents, Joachim and Anna, is offered by them to God in the temple at Jerusalem.”

And in the next chapter, “In the Orthodox Church the Virgin Mary is the image of those who are being saved….she shows how all people must be when they are sanctified by the Holy Spirit as servants of God and imitators of Christ.”

Lord, may we by your grace imitate your Mother in her glad obedience, and also by your grace live as becomes temples of your Holy Spirit.

“For God’s temple is holy, and that temple you are.”  I Corinthians 3:17