Father Livios: "You left, but you didn't leave us"translated

"When you put the world to sleep, you did not die, Theotokos..."

What a strange phrase.

You left, but you didn't leave us.

Perhaps because true love does something that logic has a hard time understanding: it turns absence into another mode of presence.

We don't just love what we see and touch. There are people who have left our lives and yet still reside in us more than people we meet every day.

Because man is not just a body that is next to us. It's a relationship. It's memory. It is a presence in the heart of another.

And perhaps there is something deeply Greek here. Our people did not learn the Virgin Mary as a theological concept. He made her a relationship. He spoke to her as if he were talking to his mother. He lit candles for her, brought her food, wept in front of her image, and in difficult times he did not say a theological sentence.

He said two words: “Holy Mary…”

And perhaps this "my" hides an entire theology.

Because it means: I have somewhere to belong. There is someone who can still fit me.

The Virgin Mary did not leave the world precisely because she did not cease to be associated with it.

That is why he is close to the crying mother, the sick person who is afraid, the person who stays up late alone, the...