The Nativity of the Theotokos

God, as the pre-Incarnate Word, asks the prophet Moses to help liberate God’s people out of bondage and the darkness of Egypt. Egypt here symbolizes spiritual hardness and worldly deceit. It is spiritual death to be enslaved in Egypt.

St. Moses here can be seen as a torch-bearer, carrying the glory of God into the darkness of Egypt to liberate God’s people. The Light of God saving us all from the bondage of spiritual darkness. Egypt is where we are without Christ, in bondage to the tyrant.

The Demiurge.

The Demiurge is not the God of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible as the Gnostics believed. The Demiurge is Pharoah in Egypt. The Pharoah in Egypt was understood by the culture as a god-king. Where in other cultures the rulers were seen as half-divine in Egypt the Pharoah was a god incarnate.

Here we see a connection between the Pharoah’s hard heart in the Exodus story and an apotheotic approach to attaining union to God. It is a form of spiritual delusion to think of oneself as God, or a god, and as such the ego grows with an adverse effect on humility.

You see it in addicts all the time, especially ones who want to get sober by themselves… It’s a hard heart that needs to be in control, through sheer willpower it will be in control of everything. As we can see there is a Pharoah living within all of us—a Demiurgic impulse to reject a transcendent God and lord over our lives without Him, creating in blind ignorance to our true reality which is that—slaver or slave—we are all in the land of Egypt, together.

The Hindus call it Maya, a world of illusion.

If we are slaver, then confronting this false reality means we give up control and thus it is easier to maintain the illusion than it is to admit that we are living in spiritual darkness. If we are slave then we seek the comfort of remaining enslaved to what might be horrible, but familiar, even when liberation is an option. This is because freedom spells death for the false self.

This is the power of addiction; this is the power of patterns of behavior and thought.

There is a need to present the two extremes, though, because the prophet Moses was given a choice to accept the mission given him by God; we are all given this choice to grow in the boundaries of Providence or to reject our place within Creation and cling to a false self, a hard heart, and assume position in our lives as our own god.

The latter is squandering the potentiality of our capacity to achieve the pu state, yet we have the freedom to choose whether or not to align ourselves with God’s Tao.

The story of St. Moses shows us who we are: the enslaved people of Israel, blind to our God, blind to who we are supposed to be, and blind to where we are going. The story of St. Moses also tells us Who our God is: He Who will stop at nothing to free His people from death.

This is the love of a father who wants his prodigal child to come home.

St. Moses beheld the Uncreated energies of God as pure Light in the Unburnt Bush; these energies transformed him from a shepherd of slow speech to bearing the light of the glory of God, “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him” (Exodus 34:29-30).

The energies of God do not do all for us, this is not a Father Who will ‘take care of things,’ but show us that, with Him, we can do great things. We will face hardships, challenges, and many trials on our Way to the Promised Land, to Paradise, being purified by God’s energies along during our sojourn.  

‘I will be with you…‘

The self-doubt St. Moses shows is the doubt that we all have at the beginning or during a spiritual journey, a journey of growth, but God is with us and the only way to the Promised Land is out of Egypt which takes courage, surrender, and the Light of God.

He is with us and to be with Him is renouncing the things of this world, to achieve the state of pu and realize our de that is the image of God. It is a difficult thing to do at first, surrendering to His will and aligning ourselves with Him, becoming like Him by uprooting the passions, softening our hearts, and allowing His glory to grow from within.

We become like St. Moses, the one who draws forth to the Light of God. Undisguised. Unveiled. Shining forth with the countenance of God. We become like the Unburnt Bush, burning yet not consumed. We become like the wonderful Theotokos—the mother of God.

The Unburnt Bush prefigures our most lady the glorious Theotokos who carried the pre-Incarnate Word without suffering harm to her body or virginity.

The Panagia carried the Word of God, the very Voice that gave St. Moses his mission, and gave birth to the Light of the world and the New Moses.

Where St. Moses led God’s people out of the darkness of Egypt, Christ sets His people free from the jaws of death, from the darkness of Hades.

Christ is thought of as both the New Adam and the New Moses and without going into the typological foundations for either image we can see that St. Moses prefigures the beauty of Christ’s life in his leading of God’s people out of the darkness of Egypt. Egypt here symbolizes spiritual hardness and worldly deceit. It is spiritual death to be enslaved in Egypt. The same way that Christ sets His people free from the jaws of death, from Hades.

The Incarnate YHVH.

The Unutterable Name of God, HaShem, typologically emphasizes the profundity of the Incarnation. Moses spoke to the pre-Incarnate Word and this Voice told him that He [God] is transcendent through this revelation of HaShem, unbound and eternal. An eternal Deity that, true to His Name, became bound in Time and Space, “I will be what I will be,” which was Incarnate, fixed. God is not bound by His eternal Being, and He came into this world so that He could lead His people, Israel, out of death, Hades.

He became Incarnate by the power of the Holy Spirit and the ever-virgin Mary. By the power of our most blessed and glorified Lady’s ‘Yes,’ to our Lord: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).

While there is much to be said about the Theotokos’ embodiment of surrender, meekness, and aligning herself with God’s Will on the day of her Nativity I’d like to celebrate by bringing a focus to the Life-bringer and light-bearer through her conception.

The Roman Catholics erroneously and dogmatically believe in the Immaculate Conception which theologically destroys the very purpose of the Incarnation, nullifying His death and ascension. No, the Theotokos was not born free of original sin (the Catholics also have a different belief of original sin than others, subscribing to St. Augustine’s view of hereditary guilt in relation to original sin which some Protestant denominations really run with when it is a faulty assertion), this is described by an Orthodox patriarch, Anthimus VII of Constantinople, as a ‘Roman novelty.’

The Theotokos was not born free of original sin, or she was because original sin is not theologically sound. She was, however, born in ancestral sin, inheriting the same fallen nature as all Man, and as St. Silouan writes, “she was not quite perfect and complete, she did make some mistakes that did not involve sin. We can see this from the Gospel when on the return from Jerusalem She did not know where her Son was, and together with Joseph sought him for three days.”

Therefore, she was in need of a Savior like all of us, her Son.

The Theotokos was born inheriting ancestral sin, not immaculately conceived, Church tradition teaches that Mary was conceived by the Sts. Joachim and Anna without passion, meaning Mary was conceived in a bed removed of worldliness, removed of lust, of usury. Anna was barren and together with Joachim prayed and prayed that their God would help them produce a child and eventually their prayers were answered. Mary was the product of a loving marriage, a marriage built on surrendering to God and trusting in Him.

In other words, Mary was the realized de of Joachim and Anna’s pu achieved through their affection for one another and God. She was born of Joachim and Anna doing by not-doing, praying and trusting that God is with them, with us…

This is the teaching of the Church and if one does not believe this does not bar them from being a believer. It is not dogma.

I choose to believe in this story because while it adds little to the Gospel and theology of the Church, it shows a different and more loving approach to sexuality and marriage: a pu(re) love that makes room for the Uncreated energies of God, that surrenders to Him and brings forth Creation, a New World, and the Light of de—the very Light of God.

Happy birthday, Theotokos!

Si comprehendis, non est Deus