Mother of God, Mother of God, the Mother of light, love and good,
You are my hope, Mother of God, and the time of miraculous insights.
Mother of God, Mother of God, I love You so much with all my soul,
You are my star, You are my dawn, You are a ray of light in the earthly life.
You are Our Lady of the Don, Our Lady of Kazan, Our Lady of the Sign – all Your images are with me.
You are the Theotokos of Vladimir, Our Lady of Valaam, and Derzhavnaya above the land.
You are the heavenly joy of all the sorrowful, You are the punishment for all the killed,
Your are the Purest Bride of all virgins, You are my grief and love.
The 4th of August was the day of remembrance of St. Mary Magdalene, Equal of the Apostles. Countless riddles and fantasies are associated with this Personality.
To tell the truth, it has become news for me that even within Christianity there is no single opinion on who Mary Magdalene actually was. As a person reared on Christian traditions since my early childhood, I used to commonly think that Mary Magdalene was a “penitent sinner”, and I also heard something about stones, demons, feet ablution, the raising of Lazarus, etc. Thus, I had a typical set of knowledge of a person who doesn't know what she’s talking about.
Now that I approach information consumed by my consciousness more maturely, it has turned out that most of the knowledge I use is scrappy. I used to take many things on trust, not even thinking whether information I heard or read was trustworthy.
On the occasion of the Annunciation of Our Most Holy Lady...
“Life is approaching,” he says to me, and his deep blue eyes are luxuriating in heaven.
“Where?” I ask a little confusedly. He, so unusually close, drops his eyelids, and his light eyelashes like ripe ears shield the fathomless heaven that has stood still in his eyes.
I understand without any words. It is he who is now living. The boundless blue waters of heaven have spread inside him.
“In the sixth month Archangel was sent to the Pure Virgin, told Her to rejoice and predicted that the Saviour would come from Her. Having accepted blessing, She conceived the Eternal God who had the ineffable kindness to come into a human body in order to save our souls.”
Let me once again revert to the topic of Virgin Mary reverence in various cultures of the world. This time I have prepared an image collection with North American Indian motifs. There is the Holy Mother with a baby and the signs already familiar to many of our readers, which entwine the discovered forms with the single grain of knowledge. At that, Our Lady is beautiful as always!)
Probably, not many people know that Virgin Mary is found even on mountain tops. In the Alps and the Pyrenees, in the Apennines and on Timor Island (Indonesia), in the Rocky Mountains of Montana (the USA) and on South American peaks, there stands Our Lady, loved and revered by billions of people, looking at humanity from the snowy mountain heights and offering all believers protection and blessing. Enormous statues and small figurines were placed there by both construction companies and courageous solitary mountain climbers who believed in Her and loved Her.
This is a closing part of the little series dedicated to the help rendered by Mary to all of us. As you have probably understood by the article title, we will talk about Reverend Silouan the Athonite. Recently on our website we touched upon the subject of Ezoosmos – the inner impulse. I believe it would be absolutely fair to attribute the concept of Ezoosmos to the personality’s spiritual path as well, that is in this context such impulse would be an event, e.g. a dream, a vision, or a conversation with someone. Owing to such an event, a person comes to understand he or she is not just a piece of matter, a part of this material world, but something greater…
Such event serves as a sort of an impetus that forces a person to step on the spiritual path, start improving oneself for the better in every day of one’s life, and gradually move in the right direction where he or she has been “pushed”.
The article Virgin Mary’s sites in Italy mentions Mary’s apparition that occurred on 26 May 1432 near the town of Caravaggio. That was a true miracle. However, nobody gives information on Mary Magdalene’s apparition in our days, although such event did take place and is recorded in Vladimir Lermontov’s book Delphania.
Summary of the book: Bad occurrences were faced by Maria and Constantine, when they went on a tour to the New Athos caves. Their son disappeared without a trace, and they failed to find him. Constantine sent Maria back home to Kazakhstan on a train to get prepared for their second child birth, while he himself stayed to continue searching for the son. He was advised to find a sagacious elder and hermit named Nectarios in the Caucasus, who might tell where his son was. He spent six months looking for the hermit and finally found him.
The AllatRa book refers to the history of St. Sophia’s Cathedral construction in Kiev in the 11th century. It was built according to a design recommended by Agapit of Pechersk to Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Agapit partly let the prince into the secret of active signs, and Yaroslav successfully implemented the project, owing to which Kievan Rus became the “Home of the Most Holy Mother of God” (read more about the grand construction project in Kiev on pages 509-527 – allatra.us).
Below we will talk about the ways Our Lady protects Her “Home”, but first let’s tell more about St. Sophia’s Cathedral.
This is the first part of a little series of articles dedicated to Mary’s help given to all of us. The subject was repeatedly addressed on this website, but it is so extensive that it’s impossible to cover it fully. There are whole books and tens of thousands of records of Her miraculous apparitions and healings via one or another Image / Face, and there are surely miracles She worked which are unrecorded in any written sources. Nobody will ever know for certain how many people She helped, because the help of a personality who follows the spiritual path is not necessarily flaunted, and exactly such help has no limits in time.
As a matter of fact, my role in preparation of these articles is quite modest and minor. It boils down to working with various sources which I will refer to as far as possible. There will be very few comments on my side and almost no analysis or comparison, since all those are needless.
It turns out that even in socialist China people greatly revere and worship the divine deity – the virgin named Guanyin (or Guan Yin). Besides the Celestial Empire, this goddess is known in Vietnamese, Korean, Malaysian and Japanese mythology as a patroness and protectress of people from various calamities, giver of children and childbirth helper. Despite the fact that her holy image originates from Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara of the Buddhist tradition, Guanyin is revered by representatives of nearly all religious denominations in China.
For a long time it seemed to me the Chinese political policy did not favour the freedom of religion, but I was greatly mistaken. Look what statutes the Chinese have erected in honour of their heavenly patroness Guanyin.
It turns out Virgin Mary is revered in Japan. You didn’t know, did you? Me neither, until I accidentally saw her image on the web. I set myself the task, found more images, and then decided to publish my image collection on the website.
She is very sweet, isn’t she? In Japanese images of Our Lady there are no features of sorrow, pain or bitterness as in the images usual for Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Only gentleness, touching tenderness and boundless love radiate from these simple Oriental scenes.
02.08.2017
10.07.2016
25.07.2016
31.07.2016
Project Aim
