Mary and the Saints

What you'll notice

She's everywhere. Her icon is to the left of the center doors, her face fills the curved wall above the altar with the Christ Child in her lap, and there's probably another of her on a stand by the entrance with a lipstick smudge on the glass. Every few minutes the choir sings a line that ends "Most holy Theotokos, save us," and you may flinch a little at the "save us." People walk up to an icon of a bearded man you've never heard of and kiss it. Someone at coffee hour is getting congratulated, and it isn't her birthday; it's her saint's day. If you grew up where Mary showed up once a year in a bathrobe in the Christmas pageant, it's a lot.

The question nearly every visitor ends up asking is the right one: do these people worship Mary and the saints?

What it's called

The Church keeps three things carefully apart, and once you have the words the room makes more sense.

• Worship: in Greek latreia (the adoration owed to God alone). Only the Trinity gets it. The Seventh Ecumenical Council, at Nicaea in 787, drew the line in exactly these terms.¹
• Veneration: in Greek proskynesis (honor shown by bowing and kissing). Saints and icons get this, and so does your grandmother at the airport.
• Intercession: asking someone to pray for you. You do this with friends every week; the Orthodox simply don't think death removes anyone from the friend list.

Mary has her own titles. Theotokos (the God-bearer; Slavonic Bogoroditsa; Arabic Walidat al-Ilah) is the big one. Panagia (the All-Holy) is what Greeks call her in ordinary speech. "Ever-virgin" shows up in nearly every service. The day she died is the Dormition (the "falling asleep"), on August 15.

What's actually happening

When someone kisses an icon of Saint Nicholas, they're greeting him the way you'd kiss a photo of a grandparent who's gone ahead. The Seventh Council's principle is that the honor shown to an image passes to the person it shows; the kiss goes through the wood to the person, and through the person to the God who made him holy. Icons has the council's words and where they came from.

When the choir sings "Most holy Theotokos, save us," it means what Saint Paul meant when he hoped "by all means" to "save some" by his preaching (1 Corinthians 9:22): help us, rescue us, pray for us. Nobody in the room thinks Mary died on the cross. Listen to the litanies and you'll hear the move spelled out. The deacon names her "with all the Saints," and in the same breath the people "commend ourselves, and each other, and all our life unto Christ our God."² Every road in the Liturgy runs through her and ends at him.

Why it matters

Start with the name, because it's a sentence about Jesus. In the 420s a bishop named Nestorius preferred to call Mary "Christ-bearer," worried that "God-bearer" said too much. The Council of Ephesus in 431 answered that it said exactly enough: if the child in her arms is truly God, then she is truly the Mother of God. Saint Cyril of Alexandria's first anathema puts it bluntly: anyone who won't confess that Emmanuel is very God, and therefore that the holy Virgin is Theotokos, is outside the faith.³ Cyril was just as careful about what the title doesn't mean: the Fathers called her Mother of God "not as if the nature of the Word or his divinity had its beginning from the holy Virgin."⁴ Call her Theotokos and you've said who her Son is.

Then the Gospel. Gabriel greets her as "highly favored," Elizabeth calls her "the mother of my Lord," and Mary herself predicts that "all generations will call me blessed" (Luke 1:28, 43, 48). The Orthodox take that as an instruction and try to be one of the generations that does it.

The saints follow from the same logic. Hebrews says we're "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1). Revelation shows the elders and the angel offering "the prayers of the saints" before the throne (Revelation 5:8; 8:3–4). Jesus says God "is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to Him" (Luke 20:38), and James says "the effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much" (James 5:16). Put those together and asking Saint Nicholas to pray for you looks a lot like asking your aunt. He's righteous, he's alive in God, and he's paying attention. Saint Paul closes Romans with a long list of greetings to his friends (Romans 16); the Church just kept the list going.

Field Note: the Immaculate Conception. In catechism classes, half the room usually thinks the Immaculate Conception means how Jesus was conceived. It doesn't. It's the Catholic dogma, defined by Pope Pius IX on 8 December 1854, that Mary was preserved from original sin from the first moment of her own conception.⁵ The Orthodox don't hold it as a dogma. They call her all-holy and sinless in her life, by God's grace and her own free yes, and many Orthodox writers speak of the Holy Spirit purifying her at the Annunciation, when she said "let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:35, 38).⁶ On December 9 the Church keeps the feast of her conception by Saints Joachim and Anna, and the icon puts their marriage bed right in the background: she was conceived the ordinary way and shares our nature completely. Behind the difference lie two different ways of describing what we inherit from Adam. Both Churches honor her more than anyone else God made.

Where it came from

Christians were asking the martyrs to pray for them before they had church buildings. They met at the martyrs' graves on the anniversary of their deaths, which is why a saint's feast is the day he died, his birthday into life. The bones of a holy person were treated as a gift, not a curiosity, and many altars still have a relic sealed inside them; Relics has the rest.

Hymns to Mary entered the services early, and by the fifth century the Church was building churches to her by name. The belief that she stayed a virgin is old. The earliest surviving text to teach it is the second-century Protoevangelium of James, which explains the Lord's "brothers" as Joseph's sons by an earlier marriage; Origen and Epiphanius defended that view, Saint Jerome defended her virginity while reading the "brothers" as cousins, and the title "ever-virgin" (Aeiparthenos) appears at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553.

Her death is the opposite case. Accounts of her falling asleep, burial and empty tomb were circulating by the fifth century, and they disagree in the details; the feast settled on August 15 around the year 600. No council has ever defined how she died or how she passed to her Son. The Church keeps the feast and defines almost nothing, and says so.

The hymn "It is truly meet," sung right after the consecration, carries its own story from Mount Athos; It Is Truly Meet tells it.

Saints as family is the part that sticks. Orthodox Christians are named for saints at baptism, keep that saint's feast as a name day (the feast of the saint you're named for), and ask their patron for prayers the way you'd ask an older cousin. Parishes have patron saints. Families choose saints for each other. The calendar is a house full of relatives.

Field Note: name days. In Greek, Russian, Serbian, and Romanian homes, your name day often outranks your birthday. You'll hear "Chronia polla!" or "S dnem angela!" at coffee hour, and someone will bring a cake. If you're named for a saint and didn't know it, you have a name day too. Look it up.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: venerate the icons, ask the saints for their prayers, and keep your name day. Teach your children the saints by story before you teach them by rule.

If you're visiting: you may simply watch. If you'd like to honor an icon, a slight bow is enough; kissing it is an option, not an expectation. Nobody will ask you to pray to anyone, and nobody will mind if you don't. When the choir sings "Most holy Theotokos, save us," you can stand quietly and hear it as what it is: a room full of people asking their mother to pray for them.

Go deeper

• Luke 1:26–56, and Hebrews 11–12.
• Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Third Letter to Nestorius (NPNF2 14).
• Go to Vespers or the Liturgy on August 15, the Dormition.
• Icons and Relics, for the honor the saints receive.

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