LAST HOPE FOR SALVATION – Metropolitan of Strumica Naum
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She taught us Who IS the meaning of our life.
She taught us Who IS the real love.
She taught us Who IS the absolute freedom.
She taught us Who IS the renouncing of this world.
She taught us Who IS the heavenly humility.
She taught us Who IS the real circular movement of the mind in God, that is, a graceful prayer of the mind in the heart.
She taught us Who IS the perfect communion with God.
She is the new, personal relationship with God.
She is the perfect vessel of God’s Tradition.
She permitted the incarnation of the Only-begotten Son of God in Her – of the Holy Spirit.
She gave birth to our Lord, the God-Man Jesus Christ.
She suffered, and she still suffers, under the Cross of Christ, as none of the human being – whenever
She, from all of us, was first resurrected.
She is the boundary between the uncreated and the created.
Through Her we receive every gift from God.
Every one of our gifts to God, He receives through Her.
She gave birth to the Church.
She is our Mother, and we are Her children – by grace.
She is our last hope for salvation.
She’s not a goddess! She is something more beautiful and more important to us – She is Bogorodica (Birth-Giver-of-God)!
And I, the nobody, how to explain to you more in detail about Her, dear reader, when there are no words. It is better to leave to Saint Gregory Palama to tell us about Mary and about Her life and prayerful struggle: “Examining what is most needed to the man that prays in order to talk to God, the path in which the prayer comes, the Virgin Mary finds the sacred silence … distance from the world, oblivious to everything earthly and striving for divine revelations, choosing the ‘better part’. She reveals that if the mind is not distracted (dispersed) by the earthly things, it could devote itself to a better and higher action, which means turning to itself: the only action through which the mind could unite with God. ”
The Most-Holy Virgin, staying in the temple, “with attention and in ceaseless divine prayer, has become Herself … and She established a new and ineffable path to Heaven, which I will call ‘silence of the mind’. And, by giving over Her mind to this silence, She rose above everything created, and better than Moses She saw the glory of God, and she was enlightened in the divine grace, which is by no means subject to the power of feelings, but it is a wonderful and sacred contemplation – which is a feature of the blameless souls and minds.
Because of the communion of this (God’s) contemplation, the Most-Pure – as the church hymns are singing – became a light-carrying cloud of truly Life-Giving water, the dawn of the mysterious day and the fiery chariot of the Logos. (…) That is why – not knowing about a man – She also acquired the grace to give birth to the God-Man Christ. ”
I believe that you have now fully understood what I said in one of my homilies: the teaching about the prayer of the mind in the heart is not simply part of the entire Sacred Tradition, it is the very core of the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church. Without the prayer of the mind in the heart there is no Tradition.
Most-Holy Bogorodica (Mother of God), enlighten our darkness and save us!
Metropolitan of Strumica Naum
(28.08.2017)
