Matushka and I just visited the monastery dedicated to the great Saint Paraskeva in Washington Texas. We went to celebrate a milestone in achievement with the fiftieth anniversary of Papa Demetrios Carellas’s ordination and his eighty first birthday, but we received much, much more. In my call to service, I never get time to experience the Holy Liturgy in being still, and in hearing, sight and smelling the drama happening around me. It was a great time for prayer and for reflection of my own sinfulness and struggles. Although the liturgy was offered in Greek, it was Saint John Chrysostom’s and a lot of the litanies came to mind as we say them here at Holy Myrrhbearers. After the Gospel reading, my ankles tingled and my feet were numb. And as the time neared for the Great Entrance, I couldn’t move my feet without falling, it was if as they were cemented to the floor. I bowed my head and closed my eyes. From the sound and smell and awareness around me, there was a procession taking place, I envisioned our Lord, sitting on a colt of an ass entering the Holy City, on His way to offer Himself for us. Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!(John 12:13) My eyes puddling up now as I am overwhelmed by His love, and as I opened them, standing directly in front of the temple icon of Saint Paraskeva, she is holding a bowl with eyes in them, allowing me to see a brief glimpse of this immeasurable love that I was experiencing. “Remember me, O Lord, when Thou comest into Thy Kingdom.”(Luke 23:42)
I then cast my eyes on His Mother and on the pain and suffering she was experiencing for her child watching this passion unfold, thou whom she had nursed from her breast and tended as a nurturing mother does, was being judged and falsely accused and now sentenced to death. She has witnessed him ridiculed, spit on and beaten. As a mother, she suffered with Him! Her heart ached sorely!
We are all here because we were born from a womb of our mothers. And those mothers were not the same, some were able to nurture us and some were so badly tormented or ill that they couldn’t. This is simply an attack of the evil one on the family. We really don’t know the battles our mothers fought, and their mothers, and their mothers-mothers. I remember dear Maria Sokolov telling us that during the Great War her mother boiled leaves to make a broth for them to eat. That was all they had! And my mother was a single mother that worked two jobs and sacrificed everything she could for us kids. She missed out on having some of the time and strength she would have liked to have had to nurture us kids. Perhaps yours and my childhoods were not the preferred norm, but here we are, out of the womb, eyeball deep in the currents of the world.
In this fallenness, our Lord has given every human a perfect mother to cling to. His Mother, the birth-giver whose womb she has shared with you, She is your mother! She yearns to pull us in, nurture us, tend our wounds and brokenness, and nurse us back to health. The milk She provides is noetic and life-giving. Saint Ephraim the Syrian says: "From the Virgin womb came forth a Newborn, and He was fed by milk, and grew among children — the Son of the Lord of all. The holy Virgin Mother gave milk to Christ, and as a man He was nourished by her milk. As the Lord was nourished by the milk of Mary, life was poured out to the whole world." (Hymns on the Nativity of Christ)
In Her obedience, she has perfected motherhood, womanhood and virginity. For some us with trust issues and some of us Westerners not yet understanding the depth of the church and His Most-Pure Mother, we tend to push Her away. She is our greatest supporter and though Her suffering, She suffers with you. Maybe with the help of the Great Virgin-Martyr Paraskeva our eyesight can be restored so that we can see the love Christ has given to us in His Holy, Most Pure Mother.
O most holy Sovereign Lady Theotokos! Higher art thou than all the angels and archangels, and more honourable than all creation, a helper of the wronged art thou, the hope of the hopeless, an intercessor for the poor, the consolation of the sorrowful, a nourisher of the hungry, a robe for the naked, healing for the sick, the salvation of sinners, the help and protection of all Christians. O all-merciful Sovereign Lady Virgin Theotokos! Through thy mercy save and have mercy on the most holy Orthodox patriarchs, the most holy metropolitans, archbishops and bishops, and all the priestly and monastic orders, the military leaders, civic leaders, and Christ-loving armed forces, and well-wishers, and all Orthodox Christians do thou defend by thy precious omophorion, and entreat, O Lady, Christ our God Who was incarnate of thee without seed, that He gird us with His power from on high against our enemies, visible and invisible, O all-merciful Sovereign Lady Theotokos! Raise us up out of the depths of sin, and deliver us from famine, destruction, from earthquake and flood, from fire and the sword, from invasion of aliens and civil war, and from sudden death, and from noxious winds, and from death-bearing plagues, and from all evil. Grant, O Lady, peace and health to thy servants, all Orthodox Christians, and enlighten their minds, and the eyes of their hearts unto salvation; and vouchsafe unto us, thy sinful servants, the kingdom of thy Son, Christ our God; for blessed and most-glorified is His dominion, together with His unoriginate Father, and His Most-Holy and good and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen. (Akathist to Most Holy Lady Theotokos, Jordanville Prayer Book, pg 313)
