Message of His Eminence Metropolitan Aetolia and Acarnania and Damascenes for the Feast of the Birth of the Virgintranslated

My beloved Fathers and Brothers,

My beloved children in the Lord,

A great and paradoxical miracle is celebrated today by the Church. The pious but barren Anna emerges as the theurgically happy mother of the graceful Maria. Just as it was symbolically modeled in the Old Testament, that the dry rod of Aaron miraculously sprouted, that also the rock Horeb, as soon as it received the blow from the rod of Moses, gushed forth abundant water and saved from death the entire Israeli people, and so the thrice-blessed daughter of Anna, the Lady Theotokos, as another life-giving stem and "everlasting source", will sprout "the flower the euosmon" and will quench the thirst of the new people of God, the Church, with the divine threads, which will flow abundantly from the world-saving source of the belly Her.

Saint Gregory Palamas in his homily on the "Genesis of the Theotokos" states: "Today the prophesied rod sprouted from the root of Jesse, from which a flower "came forth", which does not accept withering, but also recalls our nature, which withered and therefore fell from him amaranth place of the paradise of Paradise, and restores it to the green and gives it the green, raises it to the sky...