"That's all fine. I've never said anything against how the term is used among adherents to it in your respective churches. My perspective has always only been in terms of how it sounds to those outside your churches."
Ah, pay no attention to old Greeks when they are in pissy moods! :)
Thereafter, as you may remember, I mentioned that Marian veneration really isn't for people outside The Church. Funny thing that. One of our dearest friends at the parish is a woman who came into Orthodoxy several years ago with her husband from the Episcopal Church. She had been brought up sort of a generic Protestant and at about 40 they joined the Episcopalians. After a few years they say the apostasy of TEC and started coming to our study classes (COE). They were catechumens for over a year, mostly because she had such a problem with Marian veneration. Well, she decided to put that aside and "take the plunge" and get baptized and chrismated on Lazarus Saturday in Great Lent. She spent the next week, Great Week, in church for all the devotions. During the chanting of the Lamentation on Good Friday, she suddenly understood and since then has had, over many years, a profound devotion to the Theotokos.
"Unless you believe you will not understand" is alleged to be a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:9.But whatever the provenance or accuracy of the rendering, the thought is accurate. God answers (since "rewards" will scandalize those who have taken one sip and think they have drained the cup) faith with increased understanding, always, as it seems, asking us to take the first step out of love for Him. Only after we have stepped off the edge do we see that it was He all along, from before the idea of taking any steps at all occurred to us. He made our feet itch; He made us long to set out; He brought us to the edge; He gave us the "subjective principle of volition (Kant)" to step out over the edge; and then it was He who showed us how we were surrounded, protected, born up -- so that our foot would not be suffered to dash itself against the least little stone -- with love.
This is one game, the only game,where the only smart thing to do is bet all you have on each roll.
That's one heck of a lot to simply put aside and see where it leads her.