From a talk given by Fr. Roman Braga at St. Vlad’s Ed Day before I was actually received into Orthodox communion (in the Russian Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem, by my Spiritual Father, now Abp Paul of Ryazan) I gained a substantial insight into the Church. Being Romanian, Fr. Roman, using the text we usually hear translated “You are the temple of God” (1Cor. 3:16), spent his entire talk impressing it on us that we are the CHURCH of God. Just as much as the church building where the vigil candle burns constantly, signifying God’s presence, he told us, WE are the Church of God. Ergo, he stressed to us, don’t criticize the Church not doing whatever you think is lacking, but get busy doing it yourselves!

I am what these days goes by the appellative “convert”. Although I did not “convert” to anything other than the religion within which I was raised (low church Episcopalian) when I became Catholic. I felt the Church should be infallible – and it really did not take all that long to discover that the internal contradictions themselves within the Catholic Church of that time (the 50’s – “existentialism” was the hot ticket in my field, philosophy) radically belied that claim. Furthermore, as I later learned from Thomas Aquinas, quotes from whom made up an extensive Appendix by the future Pope John Paul II to his doctoral thesis on “The Object of Faith in St. John of the Cross” – an appendix added to cover an issue the young John Paul II could not at the time come to grips with, although he eventually did so in his encyclical Ut Unum Sint, published in May of 1995, after I had begun writing to him regularly several times a week, initially prompted by my stunned reaction to Constantinopolitan Pat. Bartholomew’s “encyclical” for Sunday of Orthodoxy, this being his manic response to the SCOBA meeting in Ligonier, PA, in Nov/Dec 1994. Anyone unfamiliar with the circumstances can search on the key words – there’s volumes on this whole megillah the internet. Ut Unum Sint is the encyclical in which John Paul says: “I am convinced that I have a particular responsibility…in heeding the request made of me to find a way of exercising the primacy which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation” (n. 95).

So what I learned from St. Thomas via the future pope’s appendix to his thesis was that dogmatic formulations can never be the object of faith, that is, faith in God, which is of the unseen (cf Hb 11:1ff), because God, Who is infinite, can never be encapsulated in any dogmatic formula, such formulae being the way our minds, which function by complex rationcination, are constrained to express our knowledge of God – the object of Faith – which is simple as God Himself is absolute simplicity. Not that this came to me as a new revelation, among many other very persuasive witnesses, we have the spiritual classic, “The Cloud of Unknowing” which I had re-read many times over – and the smart Jews wouldn’t even dare to express God’s name.

All this background became most relevant this year on the feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Holy of Holies, which is concerned with the identification of the Mother of God – through whom we become churches of God - with the most sacred Holy of Holies! We encounter this teaching on every Marian feast, for the standard Epistle reading for the feasts of Mary is: Hebrews 9:1-7 Then indeed, even the first covenant had ordinances of divine service and the earthly sanctuary. For a tabernacle was prepared: the first part, in which was the lampstand, the table, and the showbread, which is called the sanctuary; and behind the second veil, the part of the tabernacle which is called the Holiest of All, which had the golden censer and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which were the golden pot that had the manna, Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant; and above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat…. Now when these things had been thus prepared, the priests always went into the first part of the tabernacle, performing the services. But into the second part the high priest went alone once a year, not without blood, which he offered for himself and for the people's sins committed in ignorance.

In the New Covenant, Mary becomes herself the Holy of Holies, even the abode of God Himself, for it was by being overshadowed by the Holy Spirit that she conceived God the Word in our fleshly human nature: God become man – and thusly she conceives each one of us into the divine nature at baptism, whereby the Holy Spirit indwells within us, those many brethren of whom Jesus is the firstborn (Rm 8:29). This amazing reality is depicted especially in the ikon known as the “Burning [Unburnt] Bush”.

Note the related Troparion: The miracle that Moses witnessed on Sinai in the burning bush Foretold your virgin childbearing, O pure Mother. We the faithful cry to you: Rejoice, O truly living bush! Rejoice, O holy mountain! Rejoice, O sanctified expanse and most holy Theotokos!

Fr. Denis Bradley, of the OCA Primatial Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Washington, in his sermon on this mystery, in connection with this year’s feast, lead off with a summary of the historical development in the eastern and western traditions, of the feast itself, and the historical texts on which it is based, which really do not have very weighty – if any – canonical authority. I was just about ready to succumb to boredom when he stated most emphatically that, for this very reason, it is the theology of this feast which is important for us, not its history! He began with a text read in Vespers of the feast:

“Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem, Lo, your King comes to you…” Zechariah 9:9

In the identification of Mary with the Holy of Holies, there is an absolutely crucial theological divergence in the way this is understood in our Orthodox tradition, as against its celebration within the Catholic tradition.

In the Catholic prayers for the feast, I ran across the petition: “Let no profane hand touch the pure virgin!” The implication of this and other readings was that she was consigned to live in the Temple to protect her virginity, in the physical sense. While I did not have all the Catholic services available to read, it is routinely the case among Catholics, when Mary’s virginity is concerned, that the issue of her not knowing the “impurity” or “stain” of sex is paramount. (Orthodox in the west have latched onto this theological aberration, in the most relevant prayer, sung at almost every Eucharistic Liturgy right after the Consecration, the term used by the OCA is “defilement”, by Greeks, “corruption”!) When I surfed Catholic sites regarding the Feast of the Entry of the Virgin into the Temple, it was explicitly stated that this feast was very important to the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. We see in Catholic hymnography and iconography and statuary that this a-sexual virginity is uppermost – whereas in the genuine Orthodox tradition, it is most emphatically her virginal MATERNITY which is uppermost. The Holy Spirit, by His overshadowing of her, is the father of her offspring:

The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the Child to be born will be holy, He will be called “Son of God”. (Lk 2:35)

The Holy Spirit, incidentally, is thus also the Spouse of the Mother of God. We are, moreover, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit when we are re-born into God’s own triune, divine nature, becoming His sons and daughters. Jesus tells Nicodemus: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” (Jn 3:5) What water would this be, if not that of Mary’s womb? We see this in the baptism of John the Forerunner, within the womb of St. Elizabeth, when she came into the presence of Mary, carrying Jesus in her own womb:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste … into the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leapt in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb…. As soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. (Lk 1:39-45)

To these words of Elizabeth Mary responds with that Magnificat within which resonates the prophecy of Zechariah which Fr. Bradley alluded to:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor upon the lowliness of His handmaid; surely from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things to me, and holy is His name. Lk 1:46-55

Surely it would be impossible to be more emphatic in acknowledging every glory as not her own but the absolutely gratuitous gift of God: “from now on”, that is, from this moment, in which the long awaited and ardently anticipated wonder God is performing within her, is through Elizabeth and her still unborn offspring, John the Forerunner, being proclaimed to the world at large, “all generations will call me blessed,” she says, but Mary makes no claim whatsoever of her own, she is blessed “because the Mighty One has done great things to me, and holy is His name.”

In line with this, rarely do Orthodox ikons depict Mary other than with her Son, typically holding Him forth in some way, giving Him to us – I have never seen an Orthodox ikon in which Mary and Jesus are looking into one another’s eyes as if oblivious to anyone else. In the very beautiful ikon known as the “Sign”, Jesus beckons to us from within her womb – and her own outstretched arms are like an extension of His own.

The reason Mary is the exemplar of every perfection of humankind has nothing whatsoever to do with her freedom from any “impurity” in the normal manner of childbearing ordained and sanctified by God from all eternity. It has everything to do with the fact that, since Christ willed to become incarnate in our fleshly nature, He must needs assume that nature in the most exemplary form possible.

Jesus Christ is true God and true man, for, as St. Paul explains, and with such admirable lucidity, we can only be stunned and flabbergasted that anyone could dream up so diabolically false a scenario as that such a mix was necessitated by the wrath of God, in His offense at Adam after his fall – after God Himself put into Adam the ingredients which allowed this fall, and also pre-destined from all eternity that His divine Son would “clothe Himself” in our fleshly human nature - to use St. Paul’s imagery which is woven into our Orthodox services, especially during the Great Fast whereby we prepare for Pascha. In so doing, God, moreover elevates us to participation in the triune divine nature of the very Godhead itself!

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and Godliness, through the knowledge [note that the word translated “knowledge” in this sense, is the same word used in Genesis when Adam “knew” Eve. Gen 4:1] of Him who called us through His own knowledge and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires. (2Pet 1:4)

It is not because God’s “divine dignity” is offended by our first parent’s fall, but because by disobedience and other such evil desires we are separated from God, Who created us for union with Himself – so that we thereby fail of the very end and purpose for which we were created in the first place, and thus can never attain the happiness we are predestined for, but are doomed to live in misery. Not God’s wrath, but His divine condescension to us in such misery is the operative principle here.

So it is by our incorporation into Christ that matters can be set right, and this happens through our re-birth in Mary, whom God has so filled with grace that she is the exemplar of created perfection! Only she is graced with such perfection of our human nature that God Himself can assume it from her – who receives honor from the cherubim and is praised beyond compare by the seraphim, the highest ranks of the angelic order, who with no created agency, but by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, has given birth to God the Word, well and truly, the Mother of God!!!

In this wise - through Mary, the Holy of Holies, the Unburnt Bush, her seal unbroken, as was the seal of the tomb from which Christ rose victorious over death and corruption - God our loving Father “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins…. For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through Him God was pleased to reconcile to Himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the cross blood of His cross.” (Col. 1:13-20)

What the Father has done not just to cancel out our debt of sin, this is but one aspect of God’s infinite largesse which prompts St. Paul to ask: What then are we to say about these things? If God is with us, who can be against us? He Who did not withhold his own Son, but gave Him up for all of us, will He not, together with Him give us all things? Rm 8:31 It is through Mary that God the Father gave us His only begotten, His beloved Son, and it is through Mary that God will, together with Him, give us all things.

I don’t think I can be accused of being a feminist, but I think it is but fair to note that our preachers are men, by and large, and we all know how independent and self-sufficient western men want to appear – by and large – and Freud did a job on the psychology of nursing, and Angelina Jolie is not really making matters any better, so it is not really surprising that guys have done a pretty good job on any notion of ……. Well, strictly speaking, what with all this stuff going on, the idea of “living in another person” is definitely not politically correct at all. Yet this is what ecstasy is: to stand outside! That is, to get out of oneself to be intimately one with another person – communion, in other words, although in the Church even that has been reduced to the totally garbled notion of Eucharistic Communion that is prevalent, apparently so much so that no one at all sees it for the aberration it is!

And so we come again to the teaching of St. Louis de Montfort. Recalling Herbert reading to us from de Montfort’s “True Devotion”, I found it online and felt like I was listening again to Herbert himself as I read it. De Montfort says that our intimacy with Mary must be such that she becomes “the soul of our soul”. I mentioned it to one Catholic (who said he knew the book), who said, “how lovely”, obviously with no sense at all of what was at issue, so I decided to heed our prayer before Communion, “I will not speak of Thy mysteries to Thine enemy”, because I have heard too many sermons on how Mary is a “model” for us to follow, sort of like that book “The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living” …… We have a lot of junk to roll back in living these truths ourselves, before we even think of sharing them to others. Nobody has the foggiest notion of what a genuine mother really is these days.