Prayerful Devotion to the Theotokos and her Son

On a Saturday evening on into a Sunday early morning long ago in Constantinople, Saint Andrew, the fool for Christ, and his disciple Epiphanius crowded into the back of the church at Blachernae. The church was crowded full of people praying an all-night vigil. And, in those days, an all-night vigil really took all night. Our abbreviated versions of the service usually last about 2 hours, and some people complain that that is too burdensome. Well, in those days - this was the middle of the 10th century - the service took all night, and the church was so crowded with people that Saint Andrew and Epiphanius had to stand in the back. This was not even a great feast day. It was October 1st. It was, however, Sunday - and Sunday is always the Lord's Day, the day of his resurrection - well worthy of our devotion.

Now, this church at Blachernae, a northwestern suburb of Constantinople, did possess a unique attraction for the people. Here were housed and venerated the only relics of the Theotokos - her veil and a part of her belt, having been moved here from the holy land. We know well why there are no relics of her body. Nowadays, her belt has long since been moved to a monastery on Mount Athos. And the pilgrims crowd in there as well.

Well, during this vigil, 'round about 4 o'clock in the morning, the holy Theotokos herself appears to St. Andrew. Perhaps we can understand why she chooses to appear in this place where so many were showing her and her son so much devotion. He sees her appear above all those people praying in the church at four in the morning, ineffably radiant. And lest we imagine that this is a hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation, he asks his disciple Epiphanius, "Do you see, brother, the Holy Theotokos, praying for all the world?" Epiphanius answered, "I do see, holy Father, and I am in awe."

He saw her protectively cover all the people with her veil, which shielded them from many visible and invisible enemies. If we will show the Lord and his mother similar prayerful devotion, she will protect us as well, with her prayers for us and for the whole world.

The Bitter is made Sweet by the Cross

The Israelites were in the wilderness for three days with no water. And then, when they found a place with water, it was so bitter they could not drink it. So they named that place Marah, which means “bitter.” Dying of thirst, the Israelites then murmured against Moses, saying, "What shall we drink?" And so Moses cried to the Lord and the Lord showed him a tree. Moses took the wood of this tree and threw it into the water – and the water became sweet (Exodus 15:22-25).

We heard this story in the first reading of Vespers last night. This is because it is a prefiguration of the cross, which we exalt today. The tree shown to Moses by the Lord is a type of the cross. The bitter water that the Israelites find after three days with no water is like the bitterness of our lives of sin and suffering and death. When Moses throws the wood into the bitter water, it becomes sweet. And when we accept the cross into our sinful lives, which lead to death, our lives become sweet and our deaths lead to everlasting life in Christ.

Apart from our sweet Lord Jesus, life is surely bitter. It is a place like Marah.

Interestingly, the name of Mary may have the same root as Marah. We're not actually sure what the name Mary means. It may mean “longed-for-child” or “beloved.” Unfortunately, I don’t know any Hebrew, so I can only tell you what other people think it might mean. But, in any case, it may also mean “sea of bitterness.” This is a rather shocking possible meaning for the name Mary – at least for us Christians who love and venerate Mary. I was shocked when I first heard it suggested that Mary means “bitter.”

But that meaning begins to make a great deal of sense in the context of this story from Exodus. Mary was conceived and born in the ordinary way – and she was conceived and born into a world before the incarnation of her son. So, her human nature did not yet know that it was to be personally joined with the divine nature in her son, Jesus Christ. Mary is the bitter water of fallen humanity made sweet by the entrance of divinity inside her. The bitterness of the human nature that Mary is born into is made sweet by the son she bears, who enters into that humanity through her. Through her, God takes on our flesh and even its mortality, first embracing death, even a bitter death on a cross, and then conquering it in his sweet resurrection.

Death, without the cross, is everlasting, and that is a bitter pill to swallow. But today, on the cross, and nowhere else does Christ enter into death, and, by his death, he tramples death. And that is sweet. Now, in paradox of the cross, death has become the way to life.

This is fully accomplished only in and through the cross. And if we will partake of that sweetness, we must follow the way of the cross. We must drink the water we thought was bitter – the water of self-sacrificial love – and we will find that it has been made sweet by the wood of the cross.

Retroactive Holiness

My favorite icon is called the Virgin of the Sign. In Byzantine churches, it belongs on the eastern wall behind the holy table. It depicts Mary, the Theotokos, with her arms in a posture of prayer and with the Christ child - Emmanuel - within her womb, giving us his blessing.

I am a painter. My wife and I both have degrees in art and studied iconography for a couple of years under an experienced orthodox nun. Being a painter and being deeply in love with this icon - the Virgin of the Sign – I made a painting inspired by it. I suppose I am not allowed to call it an icon per se because it is an innovation and innovation is rarely permissible in iconography. So let’s call it a painting inspired by iconography.

It depicts the Virgin of the Sign - just as you see her with Christ within her - within the womb of her mother Anna. Christ within Mary within Anna. And Anna’s arms are also in a posture of prayer. Anna did indeed pray to have a child and thank God she did. Without Anna, we have no Mary and without Mary, we have no Jesus, no incarnate God, no salvation. I called this painting Theotokotokos - the bearer of the God-Bearer. She who bears within herself the one who bears God within herself.

One day, several years after I painted this image, a friend of mine saw it for the first time. He did not care for it at all. It was one thing to venerate Mary, the Theotokos, he thought, but this veneration of Anna could too easily spark a retroactive perception of holiness upon all the ancestors of Christ many of whom were not, in his view, so holy after all.

This friend of mine had been a Protestant. Though, by the time he was looking at my painting, he had been received into the Catholic Church. He had, I'm sure, as most Protestant converts to Catholicism do, struggled with the Catholic veneration of Mary and her role in our salvation. But he’d gotten to a point of accepting her. However, now witnessing my veneration of Anna put him a bit over the edge again I think.

Well, today's feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos is an opportunity for us to remember not only the role of Mary in our salvation but even the role of her mother Anna. There is among some Native Americans a custom of observing the birthday of a child by giving gifts – not to the child – but to the mother. Maybe this makes more sense than our custom. It is the mother who has done something worthy of thanks and praise when a child is born. Today, Mary is born and we give some thanks and praise also to her mother Anna.

I am not worried about introducing retroactive holiness. I think, rather, that may be a point of the Incarnation. Not the sanctification only of a select few, but the sanctification of all created things and beings in Christ. This Feast is a wonderful opportunity for us to behold the interconnection of all created things. It is easy to see the connection between Anna and Mary and Jesus and our salvation. Each leads to the other.

But God works inside everything, even when it is not so easy to see. He is with us always. By entering into human history at one particular point in one particular woman, whose nativity we celebrate today, he becomes the result of all human history before him and the cause of all human history after him, except for our sin. He becomes like us in all things but sin. In his humanity, God is with us in every moment and in every place because every moment and every place in creation is interconnected. This reminds me of what the mathematician Edward Lorenz called the Butterfly Effect, in which he observed that a metaphorical tornado is influenced in all its details by minor perturbations – even the flapping wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Everything is interconnected.

God does not will our sin, ever. But, even when we sin, God brings good out of the evil we have done. Even his own conception he makes dependent on a whole genealogy of conceptions all the way back to Adam. And many of these conceptions were sinful or adulterous. That of Solomon, for example.

The Troparion of the Prefeast yesterday speaks of this and says that "Today is born to us, from the root of Jesse and the loins of David, Mary, the godly child. Therefore, all creation rejoices and is renewed." It is through Solomon that Jesus descends from David and Solomon is the fruit of David’s adultery with Bathsheba. Thank God, David repents and is forgiven by the Lord. And God takes the evil that he had done and through it, ultimately, becomes man so that we together with David can become one with God.

I do not fear or oppose retroactive holiness. In fact, I hope and pray for it. Today, we sing in the Kontakion that, by the holy birth of the immaculate one, even Adam and Eve are freed from the corruption of death. And the people are delivered from the guilt of their sins. So holiness has indeed spread all the way to the beginning. May it also progress all the way until the end. In Christ, it has, it is, and it will. The whole universe rejoices today.

God makes us – just as much as he makes Adam and Eve. And he makes us – who are not holy because of our sins – to become holy by his grace if we will but cooperate with him and repent like David. He make us holy by becoming one of us – through Mary, through Anna and even through Bathsheba and through Eve. 

Every conception is an act of God.

Who are the mother and the brethren of the Lord Jesus? Those who hear the word of God and keep it are his mother and his brethren, says the Lord (Luke 8:21). Foremost among these is the Theotokos. She is the one who hears the word of God and keeps it.

Witness: the angel Gabriel comes from God with God's message that Mary the virgin will conceive in her womb Jesus the Son of God. And Mary says, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” She hears the word of God and keeps it. She receives the word of God into her own body and gives him flesh. The word – who was in the beginning and who was with God and who was God – was made flesh in her womb and dwelt among us. She who is uniquely the Theotokos hears the word of God and keeps it in a unique way. And so she is uniquely the mother of the Lord.

Today, we reflect that even before she became the mother of the Lord by hearing his word and keeping it, she was the daughter of the Lord. Before she was Theotokos, she was θεόπαις. Before she conceives God in her womb, she is conceived in the womb of her mother Anna in the natural way by the seed of her father Joachim – yet also miraculously and by the hand of God.

“Today the whole world celebrates how Anna becomes a mother by the power of God. She conceived the woman whose conception of the Word is beyond our words” (Kontakion of the feast).

The truth is, every conception is an act of God. I find it just a little irksome when I hear new mothers and fathers say things like, "Look what we made!" about their newborn babies. Better, I think, is what Eve says after she conceives and bears her first child, "I have gotten a man from the Lord" (Genesis 4:1). The Lord is the author of every human life. Our children do not belong to us. They belong to the Lord.

But sometimes the Lord really underscores the fact of his essential and central role in every conception. This is never more evident than in the case of the conception of Jesus in the virginal womb of his mother Mary. There has only ever been one virgin birth. God only ever became man in the womb of one woman.

But there were many miraculous conceptions before this – pointing to it and preparing for it – and none of them is more significant than the conception of Mary by the holy and righteous Anna, which we celebrate today.

God alone creates his own mother. As a son, in his humanity, Jesus is obedient to the command of the Lord to honor his mother and his father, yet he alone can and does honor his mother even in his divinity.  Among other ways, he honors his mother by the extraordinary circumstances of her conception.

Anna was barren and older and had lived in marriage with her husband Joachim for 20 years without conceiving any child. “They prayed to God with their whole heart” for deliverance from “the anguish of childlessness” and for the “fruit of the womb.” They promised, if heard and remembered by the Lord, to “offer the child as a sacred gift” to the Lord in his Temple (Ikos of the feast). Then, the same angel that would later reveal to Mary that she was to bear God in her womb – Gabriel – appears to both Joachim and Anna separately and tells them both that in answer to their prayers, a daughter will be born to them.

In some ways, this is a familiar story for which there are several prototypes in the Old Testament. One of them concerns another Anna – also called Hannah – whose feast day, not merely coincidentally, is also today. She, too, dwelt a long time in marriage – to her husband Elkanah – but was childless. Her womb was closed and this greatly grieved her. So with deep distress and bitter tears she prayed to the Lord and vowed to him that if the Lord would give her a son then she would give him to the Lord all the days of his life (1 Samuel 1:10-11). And the Lord did remember her and she conceived and bore a son and called his name Samuel, saying, "I have asked him of the Lord" (1 Samuel 1:19-20).

Another example is the conception of Isaac in the womb of Sarah in her extreme old age. I think of Sarah and Hannah and Anna and Elizabeth whenever an older couple receives the mystery of crowning. Our Byzantine wedding service is filled with prayers for the conception of children, which can feel a little awkward if the bride and groom are no longer in their childbearing years. Sometimes, hearing these prayers, people will laugh like Sarah laughed at the notion of such a conception. But we can always remember – there are precedents. All children are conceived by the power of the Lord, and nothing is impossible for the Lord.

The many miraculous conceptions in the Old and New Testaments set apart the ones thus conceived for the Lord's purposes.  Each of these miraculous conceptions indicates a person who has been given to God's people and not only to their own mother and father. Isaac, son of Sarah, is a patriarch through whom the Lord fulfills his covenant with Abraham. Samuel, son of Hannah, is the prophet who anoints David King of Israel – David from whom Joseph and Mary and Jesus, the King of Glory, are descended. And Mary, daughter of Anna and handmaid of the Lord, is the Theotokos.

Mary is the holy mountain planted in the womb of Anna; she is the divine ladder there set up; the throne of the great king made ready; the city into which God will enter; and the unburnable bush beginning to bud forth (Sticherion of the feast). So, let us glorify Anna in faith – the mother of the mother of God and the bearer of the Theotokos, the ground upon which is built the living temple of the Lord.   

Praying for Mary

In the Divine Liturgy, just after the epiklesis, we offer to the Lord "spiritual worship for those who in faith have gone on before us to their rest: forefathers, fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics and every just spirit made perfect in faith, especially for our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-virgin Mary". 

Sometimes someone will object that we should not pray for the saints and especially not for the Theotokos. They are already with Christ, after all! We should pray to them, but surely we should not pray for them! They should pray for us!

Well, if we understand what actually occurs in the Liturgy, prayer for (ὑπερ) all the saints and especially for the Theotokos will not scandalize us. The Divine Liturgy, inasmuch as it participates in Christ, is the instrument of all salvation, even and especially that of his mother. Praying for the Theotokos, we still acknowledge that her salvation is already accomplished, but that is just the point – so is ours, in Christ, if we accept it as she has. This liturgical prayer, which the celebrant offers immediately after the epiklesis, is not bound by chronological time (χρόνος).