Vigils Reading – Memorial of the BVM

A reading from

ST THEODORE THE STUDITE

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Never has anyone been nearer to God than the blessed and most

wonderful Virgin Mary. Who could be purer? Who more sinless? She was loved

so ardently by God, the Divine, infinitely pure light, that he made himself of one

substance with her through the power of the Holy Spirit and was born of her as

perfect man, while keeping entire his own unchangeable and unblended nature.

How marvelous this is! In his immense love for man, God was not ashamed to

take for his mother her who was his handmaid. What condescension! In his

infinite goodness he did not hesitate to become a child of her whom he himself

had made. He was truly in love with the most gracious of his creatures, and he

took her who was of greater worth than the heavenly powers.

The words of Zechariah the prophet do indeed apply to her: “Sing and

rejoice, O daughter of Zion; for lo, I come and I will dwell in the midst of you,

says the Lord”. And again it is she whom blessed Joel is addressing, so it seems

to me, when he writes: “Fear not, O land: be glad and rejoiced, for the Lord has

done great things!”. For Mary is a land: that land on which Moses the man of

God was told to remove his shoe, figure of the law, for grace was going to take

the place of law.

Again, she is that land which is established by the Holy Spirit himself, as

we sing: “He laid the foundation of the earth”. She is a land that, without having

been sown, has yielded the fruit which nourishes everything that exists. She is a

land on which the thorn of sin has never grown: on the contrary, she has given

the light of day to him who has torn up sin by the root. In short, she is a land that

has not been cursed, as the first one has, with harvests of thorns and thistles, for

she is one on which the Lord’s blessing rests, a land bearing in her womb a

blessed fruit, as the sacred word declares.

Rejoice, House of God, land on which God has stepped, you who have

contained in your body him whose divinity overflows all bounds. For he who is

simplicity itself has taken man’s complex nature; the Eternal has entered into

time and the infinite into limits. Rejoice, House of God, resplendent with the

light of divinity. Rejoice, full of grace: your deed and your name are more joy-

giving than all joy. For your immortal joy, Christ, has come into the world, the

cure for the sadness of man. Rejoice, Paradise happier than the garden of Eden,

where all virtue has grown and where the tree of Life has flourished.