The Third Salutations To The Theotokos
"Rejoice, Tender Love That Defeats Every Longing"
By Protopresbyter George Dorbarakis
"Rejoice, Tender Love That Defeats Every Longing"
By Protopresbyter George Dorbarakis
1. The Most Holy Theotokos, for the poet (and therefore for all the faithful, for whom he is the mouthpiece), is not simply a saint above the other saints, who sits on her throne and casts her gaze from on high upon humanity and the faithful. Such a view of her may seem to contain elements of truth, but it is far from reality. For if our Panagia has such an important position, the most important among humans, within the Church, it is because she reveals the life and ethos of her Son and God. Her greatness was that she freely submitted to the will of God and became the most crystal clear and transparent passage, literally the "only gate," through which not something from God, but God Himself as a man could pass into the world. And this means that just as our God “bowed down the heavens and came down,” because He loved us with the greatest love and the greatest eros (“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” and, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”), so too our Panagia, in tune with God’s intense love for man, moves in the same rhythm: she stands sacrificially, full of love and eros, towards every human being, especially the believer who leaves room in his soul and heart for this absolute and unique love to find a “place of rest.” The countless recorded or unrecorded miracles of our Panagia throughout the centuries attest to this reality.
2. Therefore, in the face of this stance of hers which reveals the stance of our God Himself, (that is, to be the Mother who seeks only for her children to have them in her warm embrace), the believer, through the mouth of the holy hymnographer, is moved equally warmly and with intense love: he is moved like the child who falls into the open embrace of his Mother and embraces her, accepting her own embraces and kisses. How much does one remember here our saints, not only the older ones, but also our newer ones, like for example Saint Nektarios or the Holy Elder Paisios! Saint Nektarios, in front of the Panagia of Selymbria, which he had in his cell, spoke to her so warmly and venerated her and kissed her icon so much that his tearful kiss created a dent. And Saint Paisios, according to his own confession, always referred to the Panagia – "I constantly hold her by the dress," he used to say – and there were times, we must assume many, when he kissed her holy icon and kissed it "to suckle a little of her grace."
3. Thus, our Panagia, according to the hymnographer, is, by reflection of her Son and God, the person loved with desire by the faithful, because she is the one who par excellence lovingly desires people. She loves, in other words, and because she loves, she is loved. For how could we, weak and fallen into sin, love God and all that belongs to God, primarily the All-Holy Mother of the Lord, if He Himself did not give us a helping hand? We humans can love God, because He first loved us. He had and always has the initiative, He sets up the ladder and descends, so that we too can climb up. As the great John the Theologian puts it: “We love because He first loved us.” The tragedy for us is that while God loves us without exception and without interruption (he is “the only faithful one”), we constantly disbelieve and waver, sometimes we understand little and want to respond and sometimes we close ourselves off to ourselves and in our passions, leaving outside of us this love of His, which is both the solution and the way out of all our problems - the love of God is literally our Paradise.
4. And what does the holy poet tell us further and completely comfortingly in this salutation? Because as soon as we begin, by the grace of God, to feel a little of the warm love of the Panagia towards us, and therefore the love of our God, then we begin to disentangle ourselves from whatever passions bind us to this world. That is, to “untie” ourselves from the desire of our carnal desires and from the desire to constantly acquire more and more material goods and from the desire to be seen and to seek human praise in all our works. In other words, only a fierce, pure love, like that for our Mother the Panagia, can save us from our impassioned loves and attachments. And why is that? Because impassioned loves and any sinful desires always lead us with mathematical precision to a hell of this life, with the elements of sadness and melancholy and anxiety and the meaninglessness of life that it encompasses. It is the tragic confession that we all make, when we reach the point where sin has the first say in our lives and not the will of God, that is, the inclination of our heart towards what is not God and Christ. In contrast to this, how well we feel, how much grace of God and “Paradise” we experience, when the inclination of our heart is towards Christ and towards our Saints, and especially towards our Panagia!
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
