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When starting to pray to the Queen Theotokos, before praying, be firmly confident that you will not leave Her without receiving mercy. To think this way and to be confident about Her is worthy and righteous. She is the all-merciful Mother of the all-merciful God the Word, and all centuries and all Christian churches proclaim Her mercies, innumerably great and countless; She is definitely an abyss of goodness and generosity, as it is said about Her in the canon of Hodegetria 7. Therefore, to approach Her in prayer without such confidence would be unreasonable and impudent, and doubt would offend Her goodness, just as the goodness of God is insulted when one approaches God in prayer and does not hope to receive from Him what is asked. How do they rush for mercy to some high and rich person, whose mercy everyone knows, who has proven his mercy through numerous experiments? Usually with the calmest confidence and hope of getting from him what they want. So we must not doubt in prayer, not be faint-hearted (1). The Virgin Mary is the most merciful Lady of all sons and daughters of men as the Daughter of God the Father, Who is Love, the Mother of God the Word - our love, the chosen Bride of the All-Holy Spirit, Who is Love, unanimous with the Father and the Word. How not to resort to such a Lady and not to expect all spiritual benefits from Her! (1) Pray, my brothers, to the Mother of God, when a storm of hostility and malice arises in your house. She, all-good and all-powerful, can comfortably and comfortably pacify human hearts. Peace and love come from one God as from their Source, and the Lady is in God, one with God and, as the Mother of Christ - the World, she is jealous and prays for the peace of the whole world, and especially of all Christians. She has an all-benevolent mania to drive away from us the spirits of malice in heaven, these vigilant and zealous sowers of malice and enmity among people, and to all who flow with faith and love into Her sovereign protection, she quickly, quickly gives peace and love. Be jealous yourself about preserving faith and love in your hearts. If you do not take care of this yourself, then you will not be worthy of the Mother of God interceding on your behalf before God; Moreover, always be zealous and reverent worshipers of the Mother of the Lord Almighty. For it is worthy to truly bless Her, the Mother of God, the Ever-Blessed and Most Immaculate, the highest of all creation, the Intercessor of the human race. Try to cultivate a spirit of humility in yourself, for She Herself is humble, like no other mortal, and looks with love only on the humble. “He looked upon the humility of His Servant,” She says to Elizabeth about God, Her Savior (Luke 1:48, 47) (1). Of all the saving works of God in the world, the Holy Church most glorifies the greatest miracle of the Incarnation of God and its saving consequences for the human race - the Most Pure, Most Blessed Mother of God: these praises of the Mother of God are equal to the sand of the sea, especially in the canons, stichera, dogmatics, akathists. And She is worthy of this, even if all these praises are not enough, for She was worthy to be the Mother of God, and through Her God united with people and deified them. And we must breathe in this sacrament of incarnation and be affirmed by it (1). Why do we constantly praise the Immaculate Lady Theotokos, with the voice and excitement of the Church, with dozens of songs and prayers? In order to at least partially give glory to Her greatness, holiness, truth, amazing purity, humility, love for God and for us, unworthy, Her constant intercession for us; in order to know and remember those infinitely great benefits that the Lord poured out through Her on the human race. For through Her we were honored to eternally glorify the Holy Life-Giving Trinity, through Her we were revived and saved by the Trinitarian Divinity. The Mother of God is exalted above the Cherubim and Seraphim and every creature for your salvation and exaltation, Christian, that she may save and cover you (1). Where, in what non-Orthodox Churches is the name of the Mother of God understood, exalted, glorified and invoked, as in our Orthodox Church every day?! Proclaim this name silently and diligently... For over the centuries we have learned and become convinced how powerful and saving Her prayer is for us. How many times has She saved our Fatherland and our cities, our people, our villages and many individually from all troubles and evils! Where on earth is the name of the Most Holy Theotokos so magnified and exalted in its heritage - as worthy as it truly is - except the Orthodox Church! (1) Oh, if we heard and saw the prayer for us and for the world of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Angels and the saints, we would be horrified and ashamed of our laziness and carelessness in prayer, we would not only during the day, but also in the middle of the night, rise up to pray and praise the Lord’s goodness, God’s patience, God’s greatness, God’s wisdom and almighty power (1). When you pray to the Lady or any saint, firmly imagine that you are a member of the Church, in which the Lady is the main stone of the building, the head of mental edification, 8 and know that you are closely connected internally with all the inhabitants of heaven, like the stone of the building, although soft and not hard. Understanding this way, you will understand why prayers reach the saints so easily: for we are all under one Head - Christ (cf. Eph. 1:22) and are all animated by one Spirit of God (1). Lady Theotokos, in You rested the whole being of God’s goodness, holiness, wisdom, mercy, God’s long-suffering towards sinners, all the power of intercession for the Christian race that honors You. You will pray to Your Son, our God, for all those who diligently come to You with prayers of repentance, petition, praise and thanksgiving (3). The Most Holy Lady Theotokos lived with a heavenly spirit, was entirely in God, in His law, learning and always abiding in Him, and was completely alien to all worldly attachments. Likewise, all the saints were alien to worldly passions, living solely by God and in God; everything in them was God: thought, desire, faith, hope, lust and fiery love, vision and contemplation and deep self-knowledge, peace, joy and cheerfulness. Do we try to think, speak, and act in such a way that God, our life, our treasure, our wisdom, our beauty and splendor, will be in us in every way and everything? Read the works of the holy fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Ephraim the Syrian and other saints. What a spirit they had, what a heavenly flight, what contempt for all the delights of the world - for what values ​​the world so highly, what is seduced by it, what makes it delirious, what hurts and why it rages! They were heavenly on earth, they walked only with their feet on the earth, but with their hearts they were in Heaven (3). “Rejoice, O Blessed One! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). The Lady received the fullness of grace from the Lord as the Mother (according to humanity) of the all-perfect Creator, the fullness of truth, holiness, goodness, mercy and compassion for sinful and distressed humanity, the fullness of power and strength, bliss, eternal glory and superiority over all heavenly powers. She received all ten sacraments of grace and, due to the incomprehensible abundance of grace, like countless sea waters, She can and does abundantly exude to all who come to Her with faith, all grace-filled help in troubles, sorrows and illnesses and in any sad situation. Come to Her with undoubted faith and hope (4). Resort to the holy and all-powerful prayers of the Mother of God, do not deprive yourself of this grace: Her prayer prevails for propitiation for everyone and for you (4). “Rejoice, O Blessed One! The Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). Everything about You is grace-filled, Lady: pregnancy, birth, upbringing, annunciation, conception from the Holy Spirit, and the birth of the eternal Child; and Your whole life is full of grace (4). If enemies surround you and you are in spiritual trouble, immediately call on our Most Holy Lady: that is why She is the Lady, to rule with Her sovereign power over the forces resisting us and to sovereignly save us, for we are Her heritage (6). The Mother of God is one flesh and blood, one spirit with the Savior as His Mother. What an immeasurable merit is Hers by the grace of God that She became the Mother of God Himself, giving His most pure and all-sanctified flesh, feeding Him with milk, carrying Him in Her arms, dressing Him, preserving His youth in every possible way, kissing Him many times, caressing Him. God! Who will describe the greatness of the Virgin Mary? Every tongue is perplexed to praise according to property; the mind and the most peaceful singing of Thee, Mother of God amazes!.. Call on Her with a single thought and a simple movement of the heart... She is one with God, like the saints (6). The life-giving Cross, even its signs, are trembled by demons because the Son of God was nailed to the Tree of the Cross and sanctified it by His suffering on it. How the demons of the Lady Theotokos and Her All-Holy Name tremble! Like a bright star, the Lady, She is all in the radiance of Light - God, like a hot coal in a great fire. All bright and fiery. Just as it is easy to think that He, God, is Light and Holiness, so She is eternal Light and eternal Holiness (6). The Russian kingdom has existed for more than a thousand years, and it is difficult to list how many times the heavenly Intercessor covered it from troubles with Her prayerful intercession with the Lord Almighty. But, having so much patronized the whole fatherland and people, She extends Her sovereign cover to cities and towns and to private individuals. Every Orthodox Christian knows this, because the cities, villages and lives of many pious Christians are full of examples of Her protection and intercession... We are far, far from understanding, brothers, how necessary the prayers for us of the Most Pure Mother of the Lord are, and in order to see this necessity, we need an eye or mind much purer and brighter than ours. Only our most tender mother, from the pure, bright Church, sees in the whole world how necessary for us Her intercession for us before God is, and therefore, every time she begins to pray to God with us, she certainly calls on Her, chosen among wives, higher than the creatures of heaven and earth, and at Her intercession asks either to grant us some good, or to save us from some misfortune, so that it is difficult to find a prayer without the name of the Most Pure Mother God's. And fair enough! Being the Mother of God the Word, therefore, being closest to the throne of the Divine, She, naturally, can do a lot to benevolent or to propitiate the Master. We are sinners and unclean, but She is Most Pure; How can we not have mercy on us, the unclean, for Her prayers, if only we wish to be cleansed and do not add sins to sins again?! We are proud with our impurities, but She is so humble with all Her virtues, with all Her greatness. How, looking at Her humble prayers, cannot she have mercy on us, proud and stiff-necked, if we humble ourselves before God and before Her! The Mother of God is just like an indestructible wall between God and people. She deflects most of the thunder of heavenly justice, ready to punish ungrateful sinners. Only behind such a wall are we often safe, while we think that our safety is a consequence of the ordinary order of things. But let us come closer to the position of man on earth in order to see more clearly how necessary the prayerful intercession of the Mother of God is for him. Ever since man lost his innocence, bliss and immortality, to this day he has presented a terrifying picture of the calamities tormenting him, internal and external, mental and physical, so that it is impossible for anyone not to see that some kind of yoke lies heavily on all the sons of Adam, “from the day of their departure from their mother’s womb until the day of their return to the mother of all” (Sir. 40:1), that is, to the earth. Having long ago lost his blissful state, man now weakly believes in the heavenly bliss promised to him, does not want to understand that real life is not life in the proper sense, because it is nothing more than a preparation for life in heaven, and therefore gives himself complete freedom here, often making his life a disgrace of violent passions; he plays with it like a toy, not being curious to know what will happen to it when it breaks - he does not use it at all as the common sense of everyone prescribes, which says that the life of a rational being must certainly have a reasonable, spiritual goal. On the other hand, living mostly in illnesses, sorrows, in troubles, in exhausting, but useless worries for the soul, one is often overwhelmed by their burden, not finding relief and consolation for oneself. How necessary and how gratifying it would be, in such a pitiful situation, to find in heaven a person who would have the most sincere, tender love for us, who would have great power with God and, through his intercession, help us, through our prayer, through the illumination of our heavenly light, to lift ourselves little by little from the earth, instruct us to salvation, prevent temptations and temptations or help overcome them, and soften the cruelty of our sorrows, illnesses and other misfortunes! Christians have such a bright face, the Mother of God. The most chosen of all the wives of the world, wherever and whenever there were, She naturally sympathizes with people, as subservient to them, sympathizes more not only with each person individually, but more than all people together, because not a single human heart is capable of loving all people with such love as the Mother of God loves us. Only the purest heart can love all people, and no one had a purer heart than Mary. Sometimes we love some unfortunate person, but we cannot help him. In this case, the disease of compassion is accompanied by a new painful feeling: the inability to help the unfortunate. This cannot happen with the Mother of God. If She wants to help the unfortunate person who turns to Her intercession with living faith, then she cannot help him. As the Mother of the omnipotent Son and God, She is in some way omnipotent Herself. God determined to have mercy on us for Her prayers infinitely more than for the prayers of all other saints, according to the very height of Her service to the sacrament of redemption, and therefore He listens to every prayer of His Most Pure Mother, since every prayer of Her is holy and pleasing to Him. So, whether you want to save your souls from eternal destruction, free yourself from slavery to passions, complacently and easily endure illnesses, sorrows and disasters of life, turn diligently, all brothers, with prayer to the Mother of God, ask yourself for Her high assistance, Her consolation, ask fervently, persistently, as if you saw Her before your eyes in Her divine glory - and you will surely receive Her help; She will surely overshadow you with Her cover. You will see it yourself, feel it, touch it, it will be so easy for you, so peaceful, so fun. And if you don’t receive it, blame yourself: it means you prayed insincerely, unworthily. Who, brothers, should intercede for us more, who should listen to our prayers more, if not the Mother of God? Although She is now in heaven, in all the heavenly glory, She is from us, from our sinful earth: she lived here, like us, and also experienced many sorrows; How can She not listen from there, not stand up for Her own?! Just don’t, brothers, you should never forget that She is the Most Holy and does not love lawlessness. Therefore, asking God in our prayers for her intercession for us, let us try to be far from all sin as uncleanness, which turns away from us both the eyes and the ears of the heavenly Intercessor and brings heavenly wrath upon us. Let us all, with a pure heart, run to Her sovereign protection in our misfortunes, sorrows and illnesses and place undoubted hope in Her. In the midst of the disasters of life, let us prepare for a place where there are no troubles, where there is eternal joy and eternal peace, and the Queen of Heaven will be pleased to save and cover us from troubles and guide us to the eternally quiet heavenly haven (9). How honored and exalted humanity is through the holy Virgin Mother of God, for She was worthy of renewal and adoption to God; and She herself was honored, by Her immeasurable humility and greatest purity and holiness, to be the Mother of the God-man! She always remains the strongest Intercessor and Representative of the Christian race before Her Son and God! She is our shameless Hope; She takes away the clouds of God’s righteous wrath from us, opens to us the ancient paradise with Her mighty intercession; She supports the thrones of kings and preserves them unshakably forever. She has saved and is saving Russia a thousand times from the beginning to the present day; She exalted her, glorified her, established and confirms her; She is the Surety of sinners for salvation. Christians turn to Her their countless prayers, petitions, praises, doxologies and thanksgivings; She has performed and continues to perform countless miracles in the Church, beneficial in all parts of the world (9). She (the Mother of God) is unspeakably great in Her inner perfections (“All the glory of the King’s Daughter is within” (Ps. 44:14)) and in Her closeness to God, but at the same time, despite her immense greatness, she is deeply humble. And therefore, with the greatest humility, like an ant, like a worm, everyone approach Her and throw away from yourself all arrogance with your talents, your education, merits and differences, perishable wealth. By not praying with appropriate humility, reverence and simple-heartedness to Her, we greatly offend the Lord Himself, whose glory is inseparable from the glory of His Mother and Who looks only upon the humble (10). Akathist to the Most Holy Theotokos, Ikos 10. You might be interested in: