[Kolokotronis]

Aside from the "original sin" part, this is a great article. Rather than argue the "original sin" matter again, let me tell a story which I think illustrates who the Most Holy Theotokos is to my own very Greek Orthodox wife.

During Great Lent this year, my father-in-law, an 88 year old man, lay dying. He was much loved by his whole family. My wife, one of his two daughters had a particularly hard time with this. Several times a week in the evening she went to our Orthodox Church to attend the Akathist services which are a series of hymns to the Mother of God. She stood through all of these praying the prayers and chanting the hymns in tears, but she felt better being with Panagia, the All Holy One, Mary, because she knew that the Mother of God too knew crushing grief, even in the greatness of her Faith and would comfort her. The good Jesuit who wrote this article need not fear that Mary's all consuming humanity has been lost in doctrine, at least for the Orthodox.

[kosta50]

...she knew that the Mother of God too knew crushing grief, even in the greatness of her Faith and would comfort her

That is so Orthodox Kolo, so beautiful. When my grandmother died, my mother was crushed, evend though she was as Orthodox as one can be. She didn't eat or drink naything for a couple of days and was beginning to look very ill. The Orthodox priest came and blessed the house. He then sat with my mother and said to her "You are a believer?" and my mother says "Yes, Father, I am," tears running down her cheeks and her voice quivvering. He then said "Then, as a believer, you know that life is only a comma, and not a full stop." After those words my mother came back to life. It was a powerful message that reached her spirit profoundly. No big speaches, no special doctrinal statements, just a simple statement of faith. Orthodoxy!

Now, this is not exactly what the topic was, but it is that faith that keeps us going even when everything else is hopeless, and of all humans Theotokos' faith was tested to the max. One of the most memorable scenes in the "Passion of the Christ" that I keep watching over and over is not the floggin and torturing, but the scenes of our Blessed Mother of God watching her Son. She not once cast an anrgy look at the Jewish High Priests, the Romans or the crowd. How many of us could do that?! She could only watch Him, knowing that, no matter how difficult, it was God's decision. That kind of sinlessness, faith and devotion to God by an ordinary, mortal woman is our hope that we too can deny sin -- not because some of us are "elect" but because we want to.

In other words, for the Orthodox, a Theotokos who was concieved sinless, as the Immaculate Conception implies, by God's intervention, is not a feat of her faith and humanity and, consequently, not within the realm of our human capacity to even try to emulate.