It’s pos­si­ble that some­thing gets lost in the over­all trans­la­tion, too. For exam­ple, a friend of mine took a verse that said noth­ing about the Theotokos in Eng­lish and then told me the Greek ver­sion, which included the word ‘zoe’. He then talked about the sev­eral lay­ers of mean­ing of that word to a Greek, includ­ing both Eve and the new Eve, and the mean­ing that a Greek speaker would find in that verse was totally dif­fer­ent than any­thing an Eng­lish trans­la­tion would give. I never would have thought that verse (I can’t remem­ber it!) spoke about the Virgin.

Also, as Karl men­tioned some time ago the role of a Queen Mother, if you will. Such a per­son is so far from our gen­eral under­stand­ing here in the US that the role she would play is nearly incon­ceiv­able. But if we take that role at face value, the words ‘Most Holy Theotokos, Save Us!’ are not only appro­pri­ate, but necessary.

A friend of mine came back from vis­it­ing Elder Ephraim and men­tioned that he was told to pray to the Theotokos in the same fash­ion that he says the Jesus Prayer. I’d never heard of such a thing but I’ve fol­lowed his exam­ple (not as faith­fully as I should, unfor­tu­nately). It’s a very pow­er­ful thing! She is some­one we want to know. The dis­ci­ples them­selves sought her guid­ance reg­u­larly and after her Dor­mi­tion began leav­ing two places at the head of the table when they ate together istead of the one they had been leav­ing for only Christ.

I’m ram­bling…

Hey, I love ram­bling.

I hadn’t thought of the trans­la­tion issue. I’m being some­what amazed, as I con­tinue to go through Fr. Hopko’s tapes on the Lord’s Prayer, how much gets lost some­times in translation.

I also have had to real­ize that being a lit­tle ner­vous about “the Mary thing” puts me in oppo­si­tion with many, many saints — includ­ing my patron saint, Mary of Egypt. And I finally am start­ing to find my way with it, though I usu­ally still begin any prayer to her with a sort of apol­ogy. Prob­a­bly not nec­es­sary, but it makes me feel like I’m being honest.

Wow, Grace. Thanks for this. I hit “sub­mit” on my pre­vi­ous post and dove back into a pile of work, only com­ing to the sur­face a few min­utes ago. And what do I find on my return? Your excel­lent mini-essay. It sounds like you’ve had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences to my own.

When I hear this prayer I always think, “OK, OK, relax, you know they don’t really mean *save*! The wording’s a lit­tle awk­ward, that’s all.” Actu­ally, I use this prayer myself, but I always add, “O Mother of God, pray for us” right after­wards to make myself feel better.

As I typed the above, I remem­bered some­thing my priest said in a recent ser­mon: “It isn’t the Church that needs to con­form itself to us, but us who need to con­form our­selves to the Church.” Maybe we Proddy con­verts just need to relax a lit­tle and let the Holy Spirit-led Church speak.

If protes­tants used the word “save” in the same way the Bible does, they would think of them­selves as heretics. A wife saves her hus­band (I Cor. 7), a woman is saved by child­bear­ing (I Tim)., an elder’s prayer saves (James 5), we save peo­ple by “snatch­ing them from the fire” (Jude), Tim­o­thy saves those he preaches to… and on and on.… The Church uses bib­li­cal lan­guage bet­ter than the folks who claim to use the Bible only to talk about sal­va­tion. Of course we do, we’ve been doing it 4 times longer than they have.

S-P,

Bwah! Hilar­i­ous…

s-p,
Boy, that’s just an excel­lent point. I remind myself some­times that the Church isn’t what changed, the world changed. So now some words and expres­sions are “loaded words” that didn’t use to be.

Thanks, S-P. A friend made much the same point to me in an email. He likened the use of “save” in the prayer to a drown­ing man cry­ing out, “Help! Some­body save me!”

Grace — I find your Ortho­dox blogs so very help­ful — always rel­e­vant! I too have a strong Protes­tant back­ground, so these types of blogs (as well as the recent Lord, have mercy blog) affirm my jour­ney into the ancient faith. Thanks so much!

I’m very glad to be of any assis­tance, espe­cially since I still need so much myself. :-/

The funny thing (but not “funny ha ha”) about my back­ground is that I wasn’t all that strong of a Protes­tant. We moved around so much that we never belonged to any church for long, and since my mother really didn’t like reli­gion, we sort of shopped around for the least reli­gious Prot church. (Even did a lit­tle time with the Uni­tar­i­ans — oboy.) As a col­lege stu­dent, I answered an altar call (early 80’s — being “born again” was manda­tory if you were young and direc­tion­less) and briefly went to an Evan­gel­i­cal Free church, but it didn’t last. Thank God for the Ortho­dox Church — in my case, certainly.

The only rea­son I give this back­ground is to say that I had all these very strong cau­tion­ary feel­ings about giv­ing the Theotokos too much credit (oy vey!) with­out even hav­ing a grounded Protes­tant the­ol­ogy. It was just this knee jerk sort of thing. I get the impres­sion that it’s sort of like that even for more edu­cated converts.

I just came from Ves­pers and it struck me how dif­fer­ent the “Scary Mary” prayer sounds in con­text rather than all by itself. It’s the intro­duc­tory accla­ma­tion into the great Theotokos prayer at the end of Ves­pers. It goes like this:

“O Most Holy Theotokos, save us.

“More hon­or­able than the Cheru­bim, and more glo­ri­ous beyond com­pare than the Seraphim, thou who with­out stain barest God the Word, and art truly Theotokos, we mag­nify thee.”

Thus, the accla­ma­tion is not sim­ply a prayer in its own right with no con­text, but an intro­duc­tion to what is pos­si­bly the most sub­lime state­ment of Mary’s proper honor as Theotokos.

Jim N (not me) above, men­tioned the Mary/Eve con­nec­tion. It could be that we have it here. Just as Eve (and Adam), in a sense lost us, by lead­ing the race into sin, so Mary, saves us, by liv­ing the sort of life that makes it pos­si­ble for God to be incar­nate in the full­ness of time. Sal­va­tion is God’s work, but also requires will­ing, hum­ble ser­vants. Thus the cry to Mary to save us is not some­thing that she will do in the future, but that she did in the past. After all, when we get into prayer and the saints and heaven and all that stuff, our con­cep­tions of time get all messed up. Lin­ear time is too restric­tive. This is a cry to Mary that she live the faith­ful and hum­ble life required to be the Bearer of God the Word.

This isn’t an answer to the great Protes­tant Mary dilemma, but maybe it can point some of us poor strug­gling ex-Protestants in a help­ful direc­tion. Whether these thoughts are help­ful or not, it is cer­tainly help­ful to put these var­i­ous prayers and dif­fi­cult say­ings into their proper litur­gi­cal context.

Thus the cry to Mary to save us is not some­thing that she will do in the future, but that she did in the past.

I’d agree with that, but I wouldn’t leave it there ‘in the past’. After all, it was the Vir­gin who con­verted St. Cather­ine: ‘my Son wants noth­ing to do with you and your beauty’ was essen­tially the mes­sage. It was her veil that cov­ered a church in Con­stan­tino­ple. I also don’t think we should under-estimate the Queen Mother role. fwiw.

You make a good cor­rec­tion, Jim, con­cern­ing Mary’s work past and present. It’s hard to get all of these time issues straight.

I’m not sure about the Queen Mother idea. I haven’t stud­ied that one thor­oughly enough yet, although it’s an inter­est­ing possibility.

When I reread my post I sounded a bit more sure of myself than I am. I’m not sure how many dif­fer­ent con­texts the “O Holy Theotokos save us” is prayed. I’m also have no idea as to the litur­gi­cal his­tory of the prayer. (Is it only a thou­sand years old, for instance, or is it ancient?) How it got into the the liturgy and why inter­est me, but I don’t know how to find those sorts of things out.

“Is it only a thou­sand years old, for instance, or is it ancient?”

Rea­son # 684 why it’s great to be Ortho­dox.

Hi Jim N x2 if you haven’t already checked out http://www.ourlifeinchrist.com audio archives we have 3 pro­grams on Mary, and we touch on the Queen Mother.
And Jim is cor­rect, all of the prayers of the Church need to be under­stood in the greater con­text not only of the imme­di­ate ser­vice, but the entire litur­gi­cal year and ALL of the prayers, not just the Divine Liturgy that most peo­ple only attend.
These “one lin­ers” stand out when taken out of that con­text, but when placed beside thou­sands of other prayers they are such a small part of a much big­ger pic­ture. I told a protes­tant once that about 10% of Matins is about Mary, which is the per­cent­age of the Gospel of Luke that is about Mary.

Re: the ques­tion of Queen mother (and the mys­tery of the Church), I have always under­stood Psalm 45 to be the prophetic utter­ance of these things (see esp. vv. 16–17).

Prob­a­bly s-p’s pro­grams delve into this in great detail — they always have a wealth of info!

Thanks fhr the plug, S-P. Have you guys got pod­cast­ing set up yet?

(Other) Jim N.,

I know that the Archangel Gabriel gave a cer­tain prayer to the Theotokos to a monk around the turn of the first mil­le­nium, but I’m not sure if that was the ‘save us’ or the ‘more hon­or­able’ prayer. I think the lat­ter. At any rate, I def­i­nitely agree with BjohnD!

Dit­tos and all that, s-p! I was think­ing that the Ortho­dox con­vert list — http://groups.yahoo.com/group/orthodox-convert — had at least one dis­cus­sion about Queen Mother (and prob­a­bly quite a few about “fac­ing up to Mary”) but I couldn’t find them.

I knew there’s so much that’s been writ­ten about this that it’s almost hard to know where to start … if you wanted to start, which is what all the other con­ver­sa­tion helps with. When the Church has any­thing like this that I strug­gle with, I can usu­ally see traces of her ven­er­a­ble age and wis­dom in them. It’s being young and fool­ish myself that’s the problem.

But it’s VERY help­ful to see what oth­ers are think­ing about the same thing. Makes the whole blo­gos­phere worth­while, y’know?

Hi Jim N… yes, pod­cast­ing is up and run­ning! Check out our home­page for details! We pod­cast the new shows but have yet to start set­ting up the past archives on pod­cast, but… in our spare time.….

Thanks for post­ing this. It was help­ful to read, along with the com­ments. I’ve been look­ing into Ortho­doxy for over a year now, and this issue is one that is hard for me to swal­low. And I’ve won­dered– can you be Ortho­dox and still have a hard time with some of this stuff? So thanks for being hon­est and writ­ing this.
Bless­ings,
Rebeca

As you can see, you’re not alone! I was very glad to get the input of oth­ers myself. And by the way, if you haven’t vis­ited it, that Yahoo group that I men­tioned a cou­ple com­ments ago is a great resource for con­verts and those with ques­tions. Heck, I’ve been Ortho­dox 20 years and they still cover stuff I didn’t know.

Worth men­tion­ing that there’s really no sub­sti­tute for one-on-one time with your friendly neigh­bor­hood priest, but that prob­a­bly goes with­out saying.