You guys are tearing me up- had to quit politics for a while
1 COR 11: 24 “And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.”
Remembrance is symbolic, not actual. Did you actually die with Christ? Spritually, yes. Physically, no. Not yet.
Don’t need a priest to interceed ( the veil of the Temple was rent). Mary was a normal woman, chosen by God to bear the Savior- not the Mother of God, immaculately conceived.
God has managed to carry forward His Truth; but perhaps we should all be ready to shed our non-Scriptural dogma.
Flame suit on- gotta go to work- catch you later, FRiends.
“Do this in memory of me.”
That is what is actual.
May the Lord help your unbelief.
The priest (or rather minsterial-priest since we are all a royal priesthood as Christians) serves as a minister, a pastor/presbyter (from which the term priest in English derives). The Head Priest is Jesus Christ as always and He is present in the Eucharist to lead us in our holiest of all prayers, the Divine Liturgy/Mass
Note that the Savior, Our Lord, GOD and Savior, Jesus Christ was/is God. A mother does not "create" her child -- my mother is not my creator, neither was Jesus Christ, God's mother, His creator. In a strange twist, she was mother, i.e. she bore her own Creator.
She did not bear the Holy Spirit or the Father, but she DID bear the Son, GOD the Son, hence the term mother of God -- this very term Theotokos was first used to confound those who said Jesus was a subordinate divine being, some super-angel.
One cannot say "Oh, she was just the mother of the Savior not God" because the Savior was/is God. One cannot say she is the mother of God the Father or the Holy Spirit either as she wasn't. One cannot say that she was the mother i.e. the bearer of just Jesus the man as we then seem to imply that there was/is a separation between His divine and human natures whereas we know that they are/were inseparable and that Jesus was not some man who became God or some man possessed by God.
You wrote:
“Remembrance is symbolic, not actual.”
Really?
“This memorial aspect is not simply a passive process but one by which the Christian can actually enter into the Paschal mystery.[2]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(Christianity)
The title "Mother of God" came about in the early church as a way to signify to those that did not believe in the divinity of Christ that Jesus was indeed God in the flesh. So literally, no Mary was not God's mother. But she IS the mother of Jesus ... Emmanuel ... God with us. So in that sense ... yes, she is the mother of God.
Which is more "real", actuality or spirituality?
I would say that as God is more real than I am, so the spiritual is more real than the 'actual' or the 'physical.' But, in a way, He's not ALL that much more real than I because by His gift I am not merely physical. "The first man is of the earth, earthy."
Some would say, "It's not 'real', unless I can touch it, heft it, point to it, see it, hear it." But those things are all passing away. Not one stone will be left on another of those things.
Love is real, and beauty and justice are real. The loving act is real in its being as "loving act" not because a certain quantity of food left my hand and ended up in yours. Sure, it wouldn't be an "act" without the food transfer, but what makes it what is "really is, a LOVING act, is the part that cannot be filmed, touched, hefted, heard and all the rest. You can't even point to the love which makes the act what it truly is.
I'm not presenting the above as some indisputable truth, despite the enthusiastic rhetoric. I'm merely advocating rather for the consideration (NOT the adoption) of another point of view, one which takes as a given that God is real while we aren't so much, that love is more real than the kiss or gift it is seen in.
This duality can be taken too far,disastrously. But the remedy for gnostic dualism is not materialism but something else.