Some of you already read the story of my mystical experience but I’m happy to repeat it because it’s such a great and a very strange story.
I was a very typical Soviet child in what concerns religion. All I knew about it was that religion is stupid, and the only people who had any use for it were illiterate old babushkas deep in the countryside. Like everybody else at school, I really enjoyed all of the stories we were assigned about the smart little grandkids who found the grandma’s icon of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and chopped it up into little pieces. That was hilarious! We all rooted for the grandkids who were saving the babushka from the darkness of ignorance.
But then I had a mystical experience during which Virgin Mary came to me. I won’t give all the details of what was said because it’s not the Virgin of Fatima situation with a message that’s relevant to all of humanity. This was a message relevant only to me. I didn’t understand much of it but later in life when things started coming true, it was quite an experience.
When 20 years later I read St Teresa of Ávila and St John of the Cross, I finally had a name for what had happened to me in second grade because it was so similar. This is why I hate it when people sexualize St Teresa’s writings. Stupid limited creatures who want to reduce everything to the genital area. I was eight! I wasn’t having any sexual experience. Eeww, freaks.
The Virgin said that I had to find a cross and wear it. I also had to pray daily. I had to remain faithful, and everything would be right in my life because God was watching out for me.
“God is with you always,” she said.
I felt an incredible sense of peace in that dream. I felt that everything was right and exactly the way it needed to be. I felt this luminous presence, it was incredible, people.
In the next post, I will share how I proceeded to find a cross and learn to pray, which in the USSR was not an easy endeavor, to put it mildly.
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She’s nice, isn’t she 🙂
She talked to me once. Well after my conversion, but I was still struggling with the whole dumb protestant-background-plus-mommy-issues thing, when it came to the Theotokos. Just… understood it intellectually, kinda, but couldn’t get past being rather uncomfortable with her place in the church and in devotional practice, and had been skirting the issue for a long time.
But at paraklesis one evening, I was sitting right in front of her icon and the service was not in English, so I just talked to her, like hey, I know you’re supposed to be all these things to us, but I still have these hangups about it that I can’t seem to get over and it seems important… help? And it was the briefest little thing, like she booped me on the head. I saw something– a different image of the Theotokos from the one I was looking at in the church, a vivid little flash of warmth, love, and… possibly laughter? Definitely amusement. And the hangups were gone from that moment. Haven’t had even the smallest inkling of that since. I get the feeling she thinks our protestant foibles are kind of silly, like when your 3yo has wacky theories about clouds, or birds. Answered a longstanding (but not relevant to anybody else and I couldn’t possibly explain anyway) question I’d had, into the bargain.
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Thank you so much for sharing this. I also don’t fully understand the Theotokos. But there’s great peace in knowing that I don’t have to understand. In church, I do what I’m told, and it’s a great feeling of being able to suspend the ego and just be. In not having to agree or disagree or process it through the intellect.
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Yeah. So much of it just isn’t a thing to be grasped with the intellect anyway.
Now when I meet new people checking out Orthodoxy, who also have the typical protestant hangups about the Mother of God… I don’t try to explain anymore. I just say: talk to the Theotokos about it. She’s nice and she can help you with that.
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“protestant hangups about the Mother of God…”
huh? In Poland, Mary is often referred to as Matka Boża (older Polish, which in more modern language would be Matka Boga – mother of God)
I’d kind of assumed that was universal in Catholicism but some quick googling shows…. that doesn’t seem to be the case.
This wouldn’t be the first time I found Orthodox influence on Polish Catholicism (there was another example I thought of recently but I’m blanking on what it is right now…).
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Catholics don’t have those hangups.
It’s specifically an evangelical-type, US-centric Protestant thing (I grew up in a Calvinist church), with these two main threads to it: first, there’s the anti-catholic thing— anything the Catholics do, or are perceived to do, is suspect. If “Catholics worship Mary” (Baptists’ term not mine), then that’s clearly bad and we have to stay far far away from it. There’s this other related thread where Mary has to be cut down to size for some reason: a really big and not-biblically-sound insistence that Mary is “just like us”, just a mom, just a regular human person (this extends to the common and fairly blasphemous interpretation of Christ’s ‘brothers’ in the gospel being the biological children of Mary and Joseph, even though nobody in the first several centuries of the church, including people who knew Mary personally, believed this). It’s almost a compulsive need for Mary to be… less than she is.
Poland is about the last place I’d expect to find it 😉
It’s a jarring contrast when you convert, and go from Mary as a figure of pathos (for the apex example of this, see the song “Mary did you know?”), to Theotokos, God-Bearer, Supreme General of the Army of the Saints, etc. Wildly different approach (for the apex example, see the hymn “ti Ypermaho”:
(I will forever think of it as the “Old Greek Lady Fight Song”)
And then, of course, once you’ve circulated for a few years in an Orthodox milieu, you realize that people having had some little firsthand experience with the Theotokos is… surprisingly normal. It’s just a thing that happens. A lot.
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“Mary has to be cut down to size for some reason”
When it comes to the distinction between protestants and cathorthodoxy I like the explanation that it’s about which is thought to have more authority – scripture or the church.
Almost all protestants prioritize scripture and many don’t much care about the institution as such which is one reason that so few protestant churches are impressive the way that cathorthodox churches routinely are.
It’s my understanding that after Jesus was born Mary barely figures in the Bible so people who are focused on scripture (and Christ as an adult since that’s the core of protestantism) don’t get the veneration of Mary which seems to have very much been a grass roots phenomenon in the early days of the church.
Now that I think about it…. protestants don’t dwell on Jesus as a baby nearly as much as cathorthodox do.
Culturally in Europe at least cathorthodox countries are very baby/child positive (and negative about teenagers but that’s a different subject) and protestant countries are a lot less child-friendly, from English people who could afford it sending their kids away, far away to the Nordic insistence of projecting adult status onto children.
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“Virgin Mary came to me”
That’s fascinating. I’d never heard of that kind of experience among Orthodox… probably lack of exposure and/or they don’t publicize it the way Catholics do.
Earlier this summer I visited the “Dormition of the Mother of God Cathedral” in Varna, Bulgaria (much more beautiful than the pictures on wikipedia might suggest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormition_of_the_Mother_of_God_Cathedral,_Varna
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Not sure about Catholics, tbh, but the general attitude among Orthodox WRT the supernatural, mystical experiences, miracles, things of that nature is, basically (shrug) “Oh, yeah, that’s a thing that happens”. Whereas in the Protestant(Calvinist/Baptist) soup I grew up in, anything even vaguely numinous or miraculous, including mild coincidences, got trumpeted about as sure evidence of God’s reality, or whispered like titillating ghost stories. In retrospect… that seems illustrative of the basic underlying materialist assumptions at the root of most mainline US protestantism. I mean, if you accept, foundationally, God, miracles, saints, the supernatural… and that the physical world is the least real thing going on, then when you do encounter those things outside a material paradigm… you have a framework for them. This is normal.
If your baseline assumptions are: the world is the material stuff, maybe God exists but He’s out to lunch and will be back later sometime to pick you up so be nice to each other… then when you encounter anything not explicable in strict material terms, it’s a Big Huge Deal, maybe even goosebumps-scary.
Encountering evidence of something is only a big deal if you weren’t sure about it to begin with. If you’ve had a sibling all your life, you don’t meet them by accident in a grocery store, and then tell all the rest of your family: “OMG I just ran into Frankie at the grocery store! He’s real! I knew it!”
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Exactly, and I really liked this part.
“I mean, if you accept, foundationally, God, miracles, saints, the supernatural… and that the physical world is the least real thing going on, then when you do encounter those things outside a material paradigm… you have a framework for them. This is normal.”
My point of view is fairly simple. The Bible is True. Full stop. If the Bible said it occurred, it happened. It might not have been clear why it happened, but it did occur. So if tomorrow we heard about a burial tomb of giants being found somewhere. I’m not going to leap up with excitement or start shouting from the rooftops about liars. No, I already knew giants existed because the Bible, the Word of God told us they did, both before and after the Flood. It also recorded that as time progressed they were getting smaller and smaller as well. Which makes sense since human lifespans went from a full millennia, to 600 years, to 200 years, to 80 years.
If the day after I run into someone possessed well I will still be surprised, but not that it happened. After all the Bible tells us that fallen angels, demons, devils, wicked spirits all manner of such evil exists.
So yes, your exactly right, if or when these things are encountered my framework for them is already they exist. It is normal, even if you don’t see or hear about them very often, its not because they are not real, its because they just aren’t recognized. Though in the giants case, its because their numbers were wiped out, leaving just the smallest and tiny-ist of their numbers in modern day. You can find pictures of people standing next to giants in the last 200 years, as in anywhere from 8ft to 15ft giants. Its kind of wild really.
Hilariously about the physical world being the least real thing going on, its kind of true in a way. If you think about the phrase “the world is a stage and we are all actors,” then one can see how this would be.
We all live our lives to …. I was going to say the best of our abilities, but its more to however much keeps us comfortable really. And we live a lie. We pretend that our governments are made up of regular people who some are corrupt and others not. We pretend that everything will continue as it has since the beginning. We pretend that there is no such thing as good and evil.
All of this is a lie. Good and Evil most definitely exists. Things will not continue on as they have since the beginning. Jesus himself tells us that there will be an end to the way things are going. And the government is in fact made up of people who are not ordinary people. Many of them by their actions and words have likely taken a deal for power. Many of them by their actions and words are satanically influenced if nothing else. And by simply opening and reading the Book of Revelation and the 24th Chapter of Matthew, then looking at their actions, you can see that many of them are clearly working in lockstep towards the Beast System and the One World Government.
Things like this are why I get online and implore people to come to Jesus for salvation. As there is not much time left. Once the rapture takes place all those left behind will be left at the non-existent mercy of these wicked and evil people and creatures. Jesus is the only way to Salvation and all you have to do is believe. He was the only one to have lived without sinning, meaning his blood is the only acceptable offering for the salvation of the lost. He went to the cross willingly to die in your and my place. His blood was shed and his death horrible, but he did it willingly because He doesn’t want any of us to perish. He died and then on the third day rose victoriously. God laid out clearly in his word how you can be saved. You have to first have heard the message of salvation. Then once you have heard you must believe. Have faith that Jesus’s blood is enough. Accept the freely offered gift of salvation and know that your place in eternity is secured. He quite literally died for you so that you can escape the consequences of your own sin. How much more does he need to do to prove that he loves you and wants to keep you safe. If your not saved, now is the moment. We are not promised tomorrow, so please come to Jesus before it is too late.
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“I just ran into Frankie at the grocery store! He’s real! I knew it!”
To be fair, I think skepticism about Frankie is entirely justified and fully understand the need for divine confirmation.
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🙂
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