Thursday was the Julian celebration of the Feast of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos. At the age of three, Mary was presented to the Temple by her parents, Joachim and Anna. She stayed in the Temple and communed there with the Holy Angels – especially the Archangel Gabriel – until her betrothal to the Righteous Joseph.
Well-written icons depict this mysterious event with clear signs. The High Priest, Zacharias, welcomes the little girl into the Sanctuary, which is filled with a whitish-blue light. This light is the glory of the Lord that filled the Tabernacle in the Book of Exodus (40.34-35) and the Temple in 2 Chronicles 7.2-3: "And the priests could not enter the house of the LORD, because the glory of the LORD had filled the LORD'S house. When all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down, and the glory of the LORD on the temple, they bowed their faces to the ground on the pavement, and worshiped and praised the LORD, saying: For He is good, for His mercy endures forever."
This Glory is an appearance of the Uncreated Light of the Holy Trinity. It was the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. It was the cloud of brightness that announced the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Carmel. It fills the mandorla that surrounds the Risen, Triumphant Christ in the icon of the Resurrection, where He stands atop the Cross that surmounts the abyss of death, and He is grasping the wrists of Adam and Eve who are no longer fallen.
That Glory announced the Nativity of Christ in Bethlehem. The Star of the Magi was that Glory, not an astronomical body – it surpasses, in significance, a normal star. The Glory surrounded the angelic host who sang "Glory to God in the Highest" and the Angel of the Lord who proclaimed the glad tidings.
The Infancy Narrative – the Nativity Story – in the Gospel of Luke is poignantly a narrative of joy, for joy -- as Christians know -- is a rare thing in the tyranny of darkness. St. Luke makes clear, behind every page, that there was political and economic oppression. Religion had been hijacked into hypocrisy and imbecilic feuds between Pharisees and Sadducees, Herodians and the New Age Essenes. The Promise of the Gospel had been filed away into dusty academia and scribal dialectic. The Gospels relate, with repeated irony, the confusion and panic of Judaism when it finally meets its daughter Christianity, in the blinding Easter morning, face to face.
Trinitarian Peace is always felt first as Joy, as this is the proper word for the Divine revolution against the darkness. The now-and-not-yet of this same Peace is Theosis, which is the ever-present and strengthening Call of Grace: it is also Destiny, and the very Will of God for every soul.
This is why "Peace on Earth" was translated immediately into joy, gladness and strength, even in the depression of Roman occupation and insane Zealot/Likudnik anger. Even as an unborn child (or "fetus," in today's prochoice language), the Forerunner leaped with joy in the womb of his mother Elizabeth.
Trinitarian Peace is the substance of the only true Revolution, whose bards poetically sing the lay of Salvation History, the real Economy of the only Theology, the only meaningful history. For this Peace is the foundation of Beauty, its memory and its aspiration. Every artist is a prophet insofar as he prophesies this Beauty of Peace. Every story, to be story, must somehow participate in the Story of the Word.
The Glory of the Lord was and is and will always be the atmosphere of this prophetic Beauty, and the very substance of this Peace.
With this in mind, it is a clarion peal, like the call of the Rohirrim above the Pelennor Fields, like the symphony of an August rain on the browning fields, like the morning bell of Christmas waking Scrooge into grace, that the Church announces the Entrance of the Virgin into this Glory, especially as a little girl.
That a human, still in her tender years of wonder, still able to believe in the impossible and uneducated in the certainties of decay, should breathe this Glory … that a girl should know Prayer as so much more than human endeavor, but as the spring of life … that the ensouled body and embodied soul of a little child should walk in cloud and light and eat the food of heaven from the hands of the bodiless powers, in the fairest of tales … this alone is the breach of the impossible, and alone is the portal of joy.
Joy, each of it and all of it, always requires the moving of mountains and a violent revolution against the Capital of Death.
Despondency (or depression), the opposite of joy, cannot be simply ceased or medicated away (i.e., for symptom relief). It can only be surmounted by Trinitarian Peace and replaced by Incarnate Joy.
For this reason, we rejoice in the Entrance of the Theotokos, for she is the Champion who assails the Giant Despair. We sing in the Festal Vespers this ode of Sergios of the Holy City, which I will quote in full:
Today let us, the arrays of the assembled faithful, triumph in spirit and reverently praise the Child of God, Virgin and Theotokos, as she is offered in the Temple of the Lord: she who was forechosen from all generations to be the dwelling-place of Christ, the Master and God of all. O virgins bearing lamps, go ye before her, honoring the majestic advance of the ever-Virgin. Ye mothers, setting aside every sorrow, follow them in gladness, singing the praises of her who became the Mother of God and mediator of joy for the world. With the angel joyfully let us all cry "Hail!" to her that is full of grace and ever intercedes for our souls.
We seek the intercession of the saints for many special purposes. We discern, in the communion of the saints, that particular saints have a particular interest in certain intercessions. St. Nicholas is the prayerful protector of sailors and Slavs, for example. St. Nectarios prays for cancer victims and the severely ill. St. Basil the Great is the intercessor for priests and St. John Chrysostom for preachers.
But the Theotokos is known intimately as the intercessor for despair, despondency and depression. She is the hope of the hopeless, the haven of the storm-tossed. We call on her to save us – not as Christ Who alone mediates Grace, but rather as a friend who mediates prayer. All friends pray. All saints pray. And the Theotokos is the best friend who prays for the deepest trouble, in her prayer that surmounts despair.
"Save us" we cry to the Theotokos without protestant embarrassment. And we mean by this arresting phrase these petitions (which are drawn from the Midnight Hymn to the Theotokos):
Strengthen me to keep awake in song, and dispel the dream of despondency … O Mother of the Healer, heal the perennial passions of my soul … As you are more honorable than the Angels, raise me above this world's confusion …
Or this poignant cry from the Morning Prayer to the Mother of God (in my Diocesan Prayer Book, Come to Me):
O Birth-giver of God, my most holy Lady! Unworthy as I am, I beg you: by your holy and powerful prayers, empty my heart of all despair, of all laziness and slowness in understanding spiritual things, of all forgetfulness, of all sinful and crafty thoughts. By the strength of your prayers, cleanse my clouded mind and bruised heart. Free me from the memories of sins long gone by. Rescue me from every inclination to do wrong. In your goodness help me, for I am poor and lost. For you are praised by all generations, and your glorious name is honored forever.
The Theotokos, seen in the Feast of her Entrance into the Temple, is recognized by the Church as "the Mediator of Joy." And as this Mediator, she prays for the emptying of despair from the hearts of the faithful. She prays for the freedom from "memories of sins long gone by." She prays for the cleansing of clouded minds and bruised hearts.
Of course, the world of sin and death is a world of despair. Sometimes, that forlorn fact is made obvious, even to the worldly-minded. Sometimes, the economy and the political world becomes an icon for the spiritual condition of despondency. Thus, there are many people who should call to the Theotokos, because she is much better at prayer than anyone else, and there are a lot of formerly rich people who have discovered that they can no longer make it on their own, and that their pride had launched them down a painful, wide and slippery path. There are many who were rich who have now found themselves poor, and that is the very worst of poor that one can be. Of course, iIn the economy of the Theotokos, the poor are richer than the rich, but the newly-made poor still carry the mental liabilities of the rich, and the barns of the rich fool still persist in their despondent dreams.
But mediated joy, the gift prayed for by the Theotokos, is a gift for the wise, the faithful of the Apostolic Church -- those who live in the Gospel Age and, once in a while, see a glimpse of Star and Glory.
Except for the glimpse, these Orthodox are afflicted with a special despair. Theirs is not a despondency of unresponsive Baals on Wall Street. Theirs is a psychic cost of being Orthodox. Their despair is the price of turning the world around in diurnal cycle, of keeping the Faith that upholds the universe, of believing in the Christ in Whom all things hold together.
This is the despair spoken of by St. John Chrysostom, who feared the priesthood because he knew that he would be buffeted by the psychic winds.
In this sense, I suspect, with no small supply of anecdotal evidence, that they who receive the Sacrament of the Life poured forth for the Life of the World, who enter into the Liturgy that sustains this swiftly tilting planet, who mediate in their childlike prayers life for the dead and wholeness for the wounded and peace for the broken … they who draw close to the Altar in Sanctuary and Nave and who breath the Cloud of Glory …
… I deeply suspect that they are marked by the Prince of the Air, who will calculate and conspire to chain them all with the dreary links of hopeless determinism, and with the soul-freezing grip of spiritual recession. The Devil cares nothing for the demonic and satanic fools who march to his drum. Instead, he is anxious for the phalanx of prayer, they who assail his gates, who revolutionize for the Radical of Grace.
They, in the ranks of prayer, should know, or someone should have told them, that when they signed up for Orthodoxy, they may as well have painted red concentric rings on their backs.
He will make them pay for sacrament and for their partisanship. He will repay them, for their allegiance to Faith, with the grim persecution of despond. The lustful are energized and the avaricious are motivated. Homosexual and evolutionary lobbyists have money and political power to spare, and no lack of sympathy from the movers and shakers and deep-pocketed. The angry have all the energy in the world to wage hellfire on their perceived enemies, gossips and disorderly and terrorists alike. Gluttons will work and rob to slake their demands, without rest until the fix is in.
But the righteous are often stuck in the mud of inglorious capitulation. "We are dying," I've heard it said. And, "We cannot be Orthodox in this world, we cannot compete." "We will be disappointed." "We cannot get our act together." "Nothing will ever change." "My heart is broken, I will not repent."
There is no drug for hopelessness, just as there is no therapy for disappointment.
There is only prayer: and when we quickly reach the immature limit of our own prayer, then there is the prayer of the Virgin. And we remember how she, as a little girl, stepped into the Cloud at the Holy of Holies, and there she conversed with the Angels.
So we call upon her to protect in prayer, and to save us from despair. We call upon her to pray for us to enter into the Peace and Beauty of the Trinity, and into the Communion of her Son.
And she, "daughter of her Son," turns to us in the gaze of grace, holding in her embrace the Lord of Peace and Bringer of Life.
So I suggest in these weeks of challenge, of job loss and the customary persecution of the poor and blue-collared, of economic and political woes, of ecclesial change and trial, that we follow the Theotokos into the Cloud … that we pray and fast in communion and creed … that we, the new wandering Israelites who needlessly visit the nihilist wilderness of Zin, look more blithely for the Pillar of Cloud and Fire, and stand fast, with her, on the Ground of Truth.
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