In the middle of the month of August, the Church commemorates the "Falling Asleep" (Dormition) of the Mother of God. It is the feast that remembers her death, and in that remembering, everything she is and all that she has done for the life of the world.
Many Christians have little understanding of her role in our lives. Alien categories and foreign ideas have distorted some very primary things within their presentation of the Christian faith. But the Scriptures remember. The stories we have of Mary, often tender, easily susceptible to merely sentimental treatments, point to a much more profound theological reality of her life and person.
At the very heart of the Orthodox faith is the simple summary echoed by numerous fathers, first recorded in the 2nd century: "God became man that we might become god." In Jesus Christ, God became what we are in order to unite us to Himself, and in so doing, make us like Him. Union with God in Christ is the goal and purpose of our existence.
In becoming one of us, God "took flesh" of Mary and became man. He became blood of our blood, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. He truly became one of us, and He did this in the womb of Mary, His mother.
Our modern culture has frequently devalued the ties of blood, and treated motherhood as though it were a vocational decision - a job. The mystery and the miracle of a new life is lost to us.
The Church calls us to sanity, and to the deep remembrance of our true existence. "
He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth..." (Act 17:26) Through the self-emptying of Mary and the grace of God, we have become "blood brothers" with God. His life is our life and our life is His.
The Church remembers and calls us to remembrance.
