Saint Anne Orthodox Church

 It is almost impossible to talk about the Orthodox Church without its icon, its protection and its model, Mary the Mother of God. Love and veneration for the Virgin, is the soul of Orthodox piety, its heart, that which warms and animates its entire body. A faith in Christ which does not include His virgin birth, and the veneration of His mother is another faith another Christianity from that of the Orthodox Church. Maybe the best expression of the veneration for the Holy Mother of God in the Orthodox Church is to be found in the prominent position she occupies within the Orthodox worship, and especially within the Divine Liturgy. Fr Schmemann, explains that “the Liturgy is the main, if not exclusive, locus of Mariology in the Orthodox Church.” It is enough for us to remember the liturgical prayers, so we can have an image of the way in which the Orthodox believers are viewing the Holy Mother.  During the Liturgy of the Faithful for example, immediately after the moment in which the priest asks God to change the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ, Mary is praised with the following words: “It is truly right to bless you, o Theotokos, ever blessed, and the most pure, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim, without corruption you gave birth to God the Word, true Theotokos we magnify you”. The Holy Mother is the Temple of God, a direct and positive condition of the incarnation.  If God has chosen a man to be His Temple in the future, than the Virgin Mary was such a temple of God in a most particular and literal sense. Her body was a temple erected by the Old Testament itself, by all its sacredness, its expectation of salvation, its faithfulness to God, which made possible the union of God with man, and in this sense she is the fruit of the Old Testament Temple, of that link with God which temple expressed. We notice the unique position of Mary at the intersection between the Old and the New Testaments. She is the incarnation of the prophetic hope of the Old Testament, being the bearer of the Messiah, who is God Himself. This position offers her a unique place in history, a place that is acknowledged in the Orthodox worship, but little emphasized by Protestant Churches.