The Great Entrance of the Theotokos

In writing about today's feast I defer to Abbot Joseph, superior of Holy Transfiguration Monastery (aka Mt Tabor Monastery), a Byzantine-rite Ukrainian Catholic monastic community in Redwood Valley, CA. His blog is Word Incarnate.

Today we celebrate the feast that is known in the Byzantine tradition as the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple. Many saints of the Old Testament, and a few of the New, have entered the Temple in Jerusalem, but we don’t have feast days for any of their entrances into the Temple.What is it about Our Lady’s entrance that makes it special enough to merit a solemn feast day?

I think we have first to understand what “entrance” means in her case. It’s not simply a matter of stepping over the threshold into the building. Thousands of people, both good and bad, have done that in past centuries, with no special effect or fruit of it, outside of what God might have done in a hidden manner in their souls. But Mary’s entrance has a deeper meaning. Let us look at the word “entrance” not so much as a simple moving from one physical place into another, but rather in the sense that one would, for example, enter a monastery...
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