Protopresbyter George Dorbarakis
"I shall open my mouth and it shall be filled with the Spirit; and I shall pour out a word to the Mother and Queen; and I shall be seen cheerfully celebrating; and rejoicing I shall sing her miracles." (Eirmos, Ode One, Canon of the Akathist Hymn.)
The holy hymnographer, as the mouth of the Church and ours, tells us that he will speak, he will cry out to the Panagia, who is the Queen Mother, which means first of all that his word does not express only his own feelings and his personal faith, but the faith and feelings of all the members of the Church – after all, there is nothing individual in the Church.
And what will he say about the Panagia? What word will his mouth, which is also our word, express? Certainly not some casual word – what usually suits the wiles of this world of deceit, but neither will any human thought, no matter how wise he may be in formulating a philosophy or an ideology, which the revealed word of God has abolished. His word, he notes, will be the word of the Holy Spirit. “I shall open my mouth and it shall be filled with the Spirit.” What the Prophet David says in the Spirit: “Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare your praise,” the same is expressed in the Spirit by the holy hymnographer. For no person is more praiseworthy from our saints than the Most Holy Theotokos. This means that only one who is filled with the Holy Spirit can see correctly and speak correctly about the Most Holy Theotokos. One would say that only a prophet or an apostle has the right to speak about the Panagia.
The reason for this is the fact that the Panagia alone as the most beautiful flower of all humanity, was granted by God to become the Mother of the Lord, so the sight of her also reveals faith in her Son and God – the Lord Jesus and the Most Holy Theotokos are always considered together, which is why only the eyes transformed by the Holy Spirit see her correctly, as similarly happened with her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of the Forerunner, after Her Annunciation. “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud voice and said: Blessed are you among women.” You must be Spirit-bearing to see the Panagia as All-Holy.
From this point of view, before the One, the quality of our Christian conscience is judged – we are revealed as Orthodox or heretics. The Panagia constitutes a criterion of orthodoxy. Therefore, those who disregard her or even more insult her(!), like the Jehovah's Witnesses for example, are not far from the position of the Jews of the time of the Lord: they too judged her with the most incomprehensible insults. But those who claim that she is a simple woman, like all the others, reveal their heresy, like the heretical Protestants. Those who, on the other hand, overestimate the Panagia by elevating her to the level of divinity, like the Roman Catholics, reveal the deviation of error from the other side. For the Orthodox, however, the Panagia is what her name indicates: All-Holy, i.e. above all saints, though human. Full of the grace of God, but without exceeding human limits. In the person of the Panagia we see the human perspective: to be deified, understanding as deification our union with the Lord, but always remaining human.
And the hymnographer concludes: in this situation, when the Spirit of God gives us words to speak of the Panagia, we rejoice and celebrate. We cannot bring to mind the Panagia and not be filled with joy, not to be filled with gladness. For in Her we see the excess of God's grace, which is an excess of His and Her Love, shaped in Her miraculous interventions that are constantly for our benefit. And grace is always joy. Only the devil is morose and burns at the mere mention of Her name.
Our gatherings each time in memory of the Panagia prove that we too are filled with the Spirit of God. More or less, the grace of the Holy Spirit enables us in the Church to be spiritually united to contemplate the person of the Theotokos. Our responsibility is twofold: to keep this grace, that is, to be always ready to honor her, and to strive to increase it. And keeping and increasing the grace of God, which the Panagia had and has in abundance, means to submit ourselves every time to the will of God. The Panagia’s “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to Your word” should also become our own response to any invitation of God that He addresses to us at every moment of our lives.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
