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It is good to hear from Sister Vassa again! Having been expelled from ROCOR, and even "defrocked" (I have no idea how a monastic is actually "defrocked") she is obviously under a great deal of pressure which see seems to manage with a great deal of gracefulness. Please join me in keeping her in your prayers.
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“In you the laws of nature (τῆς φύσεως οἱ ὅροι, естества уставы) are defeated, O pure Virgin: from virginity comes childbirth, and life is introduced by death. After bearing, a virgin, and after dying – living, ever saving, O Mother of God, your inheritance.” (Ode 9, Byzantine Canon of Dormition)
The Theotokos defies our usual expectations of physical reality, which is why we can call her life ‘paradoxical.’ The word ‘paradox’ (from the Greek words ‘para,’ meaning ‘beyond,’ and ‘dokeo,’ meaning ‘expect’) means something beyond our expectation; a kind of thing we would not expect, like a virgin giving birth, or life springing from death. We would also expect that she, as a Jewish woman of the first century, would necessarily be subject to some man, either her father or her husband. But this was not quite the case. Sure, she was assisted in her vocation by certain people, (as are we all), at different stages of her life. There were her parents, by whom she is led into the Temple, but really it is her vocation that *led them* to parent this daughter in the way that they did, in their old age. Then there were the priests in the Temple, by whom she is led to be betrothed to Joseph, in the earlier years, but we see that Joseph is led by her vocation, not the other way around, and not because she is bossy. God was leading the way. Finally, there is John the beloved disciple, whom she is told by the crucified Lord henceforth to “mother,” which is a position not of subjugation but of authority. No merely-human being ‘had’ the Mother of God in the sense that women at the time belonged to someone, which is a thing we would not expect.
One sees in her cross-carrying journey, throughout which she is *obedient* to the vocation that came not from men but from God, that she remains free in her obedience, which is a paradox, because we might think that freedom and obedience don’t mix. Even after her dormition, we don’t ‘have’ her body to venerate as holy relics. It was taken up or ‘assumed’ (as the Roman Catholics call this) into heaven by her Son, because even death could not hold her physically. What is my point? Because the Mother of God is traditionally seen as an image ‘par excellence’ of the Mother-Church, her ‘paradoxical’ and liberating vocation is something we all share, insofar as we are members of the Mother-Church. Our own vocations are necessarily both paradoxical and liberating, insofar as we do not fear the paradoxes and the freedom, into which our crucified-and-risen Lord is leading us, by our obedience to Him. The connection between baptism and freedom is why the Exodus from bondage in Egypt, through the waters of the Red Sea, is seen as an image of Baptism.
Thank you, Mother of Life, Most Holy Theotokos, for having the courage and obedience to follow your vocation. “You passed into life as the Mother of Life, and by your prayers, you deliver our souls from death.”
