"Therefore the steps in the revelation of the Holy Spirit are essentially and necessarily steps in the showing of the Mother of God to the world, which has not been completed and in fullness belongs only to the future age."

-- Fr Sergius Bulgakov, in The Burning Bush, p100.

If anyone ever thought (as I think some do, who have moved from protestantism into Orthodoxy) that Orthodox Holy Tradition is less "Marian" than the Roman Catholic Church and thus more amenable to modern, rational sensibilities, they could not be more mistaken.

Mary's complete "Spirit-filling" is one and the same with her "divinization," or theosis. And to turn this statement around produces an even more arresting proposition. "Spirit-filling," or what the evangelicals like to call "sanctificiation," really cannot be understood at all outside of the history (past and present) of the Theotokos.

While Christ Himself is the "hominized divinity," as the Second Hypostasis becoming human (and, I might add, with nothing of His hypostasis left un-hominized), the Virgin herself is the perfected "divinized humanity." She is the model of theosis, and is the interceding agent of theosis for all who come after her.



As the one human who is present with Christ before all the rest of Creation is transfigured at the Last Judgment, Mary is the fullness of "creaturely Wisdom," just as the Trinity's divine essence is "divine Wisdom."

Thus, Wisdom and theosis cannot be separated. "Sanctification" cannot be isolated from Mary nor Sophia.

Perhaps the constant appeal of Nestorianism can be explained by the world's resistance to this linkage, between wisdom and theosis, or between sanctification and Mary. If Mary is the mother only of the human nature of Christ, then she is effectively removed from all religion, spirituality and faith.

She has become unnecessary in the Nestorian frame. But her removal produces just another appearance of Docetism.

The Holy Spirit, in coming upon Mary at the Annunciation, brings Christ with Him and creates a motherhood that is first spiritual and also physical. Mary is the mother of Christ divine and human. And her motherhood continues in a singular, but also exemplary, way.

Christianity -- especially Orthodox Christianity -- cannot be non-Mariological in any moment. The Wisdom of the Theotokos is necessary for every prayer, every sacrament, even every institutional or administrative moment of Church life.

I think, because we live in such a secularized, flattened age, that the most immediate indication of our crypto-secularity is our invention of non-Marian, non-sophiological moments.

God will not be entertained (or "pleased," which is probably the same thing in the modern psyche) by our institutional experiments, especially if they are launched in the dreary non-wisdoms drawn from the marketplace and social theory. He will probably remain deafeningly silent.

Until we think, and speak, the way we are. "Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it unto me according to your Word."