#panagia

"It is truly meet to bless thee, the Theotokos, ever blessed and most blameless, and the Mother of our God. More honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim, who without corruption gavest birth to God the Word, the very Theotokos, thee do we magnify."

~From the Prayer Rule of St. Pachomius the Great

"We find it strange that for some Christians, the Mother of God is a stumbling block in the way of their worship of Christ God. She is not a rival goddess! Even as we might well ask a friend to pray for us, as indeed we all pray for each other (or should do), so we ask her, again and again, to pray for us. All prayers, we have been told, are acceptable, but if in heavenly terms there is any equivalent to human values, then what could be more valuable than the prayers of his own Mother?"

~From Eternity Now, by Mother Thekla

"The womb of the Virgin was not 'borrowed space' which God inhabited until His birth. The womb of the Virgin is also that place and that source by which God 'took flesh of the Virgin Mary'.”

~Fr. Stephen Freeman

"The God of love has given us a loving mother. The God of love has come to His beloved, out of love. But He came through her whose heart was filled with love for God and man. And when His sacrifice of love embraced the entire world in a mystical way, He, loving and crucified for us, adopted us precisely to her and her maternal heart in the person of the Apostle of Love:  Behold thy mother! (Jn. 19:27)."

~Priest Valery Dukhanin Source: orthodoxadventure