When the Homily is about Immunology

"the warp"

While perhaps not "in season", I am reading a collection of early patristic homilies on the Theotokos - particularly in relation to her Dormition. I've only just begun, but am already awe struck by some of what I am reading. How much my protestant brothers and sisters rob themselves by negating our Mother's role in the great restoration.

St. Proclus preached a riveting (and perhaps dangerous) sermon around the season of Nativity in Constantinople while the heretic Patriarch Nestorius listened. In it, St. Proclus is quoted as saying the following:

The celebration in honor of the virgin, my brother and sisters, calls our tongue to speak well today. This present festival is a harbinger of future well-being for all who have met together here – and rightly so! For it shows us the reason for purity, and offers us womanhood’s most exalted boast. Holy Mary has called us together, the imaculate treasure of virginity, the spiritual paradise of the second Adam, the workshop where natures were united; the festival of our saving covenant, the chamber in which the Word made flesh his bride; the living thornbush of our nature, which the fire of a divine childbirth did not burn up; the truly radiant cloud, which bore in a body Him who thrones above the Cherubim; the fleece made pure by heavenly dew, in which the Shepherd dresses as the sheep; servant and mother, virgin and heaven, only bridge between God and the human race; awe-inspiring loom of God’ saving plan, on which the garment of unity was indescribably woven, whose weaver is the Holy Spirit, and whose spinner is the overshadowing power from on high, whose wool is the old sheepskin of Adam; the warp is the immaculate flesh of the Virgin, the shuttle the measureless grace of her who bore Him, and the designer is the Word, who entered her by hearing.

Also, in doing a little web searching last night I found this link. It is a vast collection (from a Roman Catholic source I believe) of Scriptures and Patristic quotes regarding the Theotokos - worth checking out.