A little over a year ago, I was in a hospital in Florida, where my dad was admitted due to a heart-attack. I was standing with my mom and brother in the waiting room of the ICU when I had an interesting experience while wearing a shirt with an image of the Mother of God and Christ Child Jesus on it. With the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God coming up, I felt it was a good time to share this story with you all.
There were two or three other groups of families in the waiting room with us. The atmosphere was heavy and, as you’d expect, everyone in the room looked down-trodden. We had to wait for a nurse to come out and lead us back to my dad’s room. We weren’t standing very long before I felt like I was being intently watched, but I didn’t look around to see if I was correct in my feeling. I chalked it up to stress and from being tired from the whole experience. As soon as I had convinced myself it was nothing, a young girl came up to me from across the room. She shyly said to me, “Excuse me, my aunt has a question for you.” I walked across the lobby to the girl’s aunt, and another woman who I assumed to be the girl’s mother. The aunt and the assumed mother were very clearly related, having similar looks, except the mother had something wrong with one of her eyes.
The aunt asked me who was on my shirt. I said the Theotokos, and she confusedly asked again, who? I apologized as I pointed to the image and said, Mary the Mother of God, and Jesus, as I pointed to the picture of our Lord. She replied with a large, warm smile and said she thought it looked familiar. She then asked what style of image it was, and I told her it was Greek Orthodox Christian. She said she liked the image, and I thanked her. I then awkwardly, as if I worked there, told her that if she had any more questions to just let me know. Then I walked back across the room to my mom and brother with a peculiar feeling. I was glad that my shirt made someone else happy, and the joy she got from the image brought a brief feeling of joy to my mind in a time I was feeling great grief.
At that point in time, coming from a Protestant background, I wasn’t well-read in the Orthodox teaching of the veneration of the Theotokos (literally God-bearer). Nor had I yet read the many quotes of Saints throughout history which prove that the teaching of her veneration is of apostolic tradition, existing from the very birth of the early church, and not a later development.
Tradition holds that St. Luke the Evangelist painted images of Mary with and without Christ Child Jesus. He showed them to her and she approved of them.1 As St. John Maximovitch, Archbishop of Shanghai and San Francisco said in his work The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God: “If God the Father chose her, God the Holy Spirit descended upon her, and God the Son dwelt in her, submitted to her in the days of His youth, was concerned for her when hanging on the Cross – then should not everyone who confesses the Holy Trinity venerate her?”2
You can feel the love and humility of the Theotokos in the images of the Church, even when they’re screen-printed on a t-shirt, and seen from across the waiting room of an intensive care unit in Florida. Most Holy Theotokos, intercede for us.
+Endnotes+
1. St. John Maximovitch. “The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God,” True Orthodox Christianity, accessed August 14, 2020, https://www.trueorthodoxy.info/apo_stjohnmaximovitch_orthodox_veneration_Mother_God.shtml
2. Id.