How great is the face of our Lady! She shows us the way and gives us the way of deification, that is, how every person can reach the state of becoming likeness God and of communion with Him. Our Lady is both a model of life and a source of strength through the shelter of her embassies on this course. But how does this happen?
There are six characteristics that refer to the person of the Virgin Mary.
Number one is humility. It is clearly shown in the Annunciation, her response to Archangel Gabriel: “Idou the servant of the Lord be gracious to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38), that is, her immediate surrender and submission to unimaginable and incomprehensible to her will of God, in complete humility and without a trace of her own will.
The second idiom of the Virgin Mary is her virginal purity, not only in her body, but in her life in general. We call her Virgin, patroness, aspilon, immaculate, pure, and incorruptible. Saint Gregory Palamas, in his speech on the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, describes this purity of the Mother of God’s person and says, among other things, that she was not even contaminated by worldly knowledge. That’s why he didn’t go to school, but was trained in spiritual matters in the temple. He studied celestial science and wisdom at the University of the Sanctuary. He was not contaminated by the conversations, by the inversion, by the thickness of worldly communication, but he lived in all this absolute silence, absolute obscurity.
And this brings us to the third element of the Virgin Mary – her obscurity and silence. It is characteristic that in the Gospels the face of the Virgin Mary hardly appears at all. In fact, in the Gospel of Mark there is not even a hint of her existence and life, while Gospel in Matthew and Gospel Luke, which has the most evidence, there are very few references, especially to the event of the birth of the Lord. In Gospel in John only her conversation with the Lord at the time of the miracle of Cana is mentioned, as well as the Lord’s dialogue with John and the Virgin Mary on the cross: ‘Woman, behold your son, behold your mother says to the disciple’ (Jn 26, 27). Finally, there is a reference to the “Mother of Jesus” again by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:14), while the apostle Paul does not mention a single word.
So invisibly did the person of the Virgin Mary pass away, yet being a powerful catalyst of the divine economy in the life of humanity? She did not speak many words, nor did she create tensions, nor did she want to give proofs of the divinity of the Lord after His crucifixion and resurrection. She lived quite gently, as her biographers tell us in her biography, for a few more years. Her completely silent life is followed by the earthquake of her sleep, her miraculous departure from this world, with the gathering of the apostles “with a nod of the head.”
The third idiom of the theomoretic life and the characteristic of man who wants to walk the path to union with God is obscurity and secret quiet and silence.
There are three more that I will simply mention, borrowing them from characteristic names that the Church has given it. One is Theotokos, the second is celibate and the third is ever-virgin.
One thing therefore is the idiom of the Virgin Mary, to give birth to Christ. This is what every believer is called to do in his life, to give birth to Christ in secret, be “an epistle of Christ, made alive and renewed among all men” (2 Cor. c. 2).
The second idiom is that she was unmarried, which means that she did not experience to Marriage she had no conjugal connection to bring Christ to life. . In a similar way, every believer, who wants to live his life of sanctification and pass into the state of divinity, must be made according to human measure, as the fathers say, “infinity” of nature, i.e. to participate as little as possible in natural impulses, natural states and even the senses. The inexperience of nature, the freedom from natural fatness, leads to the experience of grace.
And the last element, forever virgin, the permanence of grace. The Virgin Mary was not only a virgin until the birth of Christ, but remained a virgin “and after the birth of Christ “, as the troparia say. He remained a constant virgin, that’s what it means to be a perpetual virgin. This permanence of the state of grace is the last element, which could be a foretaste of our path to theosis.
If we also live in this way with the example of the Virgin Mary, in terms of her humility, her virginal purity, not to be seen, its mystical silence and quiet, but also if we can participate in the mystery and the state of giving birth to God within us, of being as threatened by nature as less i.e. unaffected by our enslavement to it, and of the everlasting, that is, everlasting, participation in grace, we too shall be able to experience mysterious way our union with God to we participate the state of communion together God, that is, of theosis.
And when one day our death will also come, then it will not be an end, but only a dormition, a sleep and a transition from the thick to the thin, from the temporary to the eternal, from the human to the divine, from the corruptible to the incorruptible.
May God give to all of us, with this spirit, that there may be substantial fruitfulness in our petitions and that Our Lady, our mother, may redeem us from our needs, sorrows, pains, daily difficulties, but above all that she may be for everyone the mystical model of another life in grace and in spirit. Amen
