Here’s something new I learned about St. Mary, that surprised me and gave me a whole new understanding of her.

I’ve been reading The Life of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos (1989, Holy Apostles Convent, Buena Vista CO), which pulls together all the writings of the Church Fathers about her, all the hymns, everything in the Orthodox faith about her, to use in describing her life chronologically.

And it says, to my surprise: “The young Virgin Mary gave herself up entirely to God and repulsed from herself every impulse to sin, yet still felt the weakness of human nature more powerfully than others.” (That’s a summary by the editor, not a direct quote.) She wasn’t floating in a bubble of perfection; she worked at it, repulsing temptation, and aware of her human weakness even more powerfully than most.

St. John of Damascus: “She grew up in the house of God…turning her mind away from every worldly and carnal desire…[S]he sought and strove after holiness.”

So Mary consciously “turned away,” and “sought and strove,” wrenching her mind away from her desires. In Ortho-speak, Mary was a struggler. That means someone who stands up against temptation and does battle to resist it.

In the Orthodox understanding, someone who struggles against a sin and even sometimes falls, but who gets up again and keeps fighting, deserves a greater crown in heaven than someone who escaped having that temptation in the first place.

That’s a change for me. I thought Mary just found it easy to resist temptation. Not that she was the Immaculate Conception, the Catholic dogma that says she was born without stain (macula) of Original Sin—Orthodox don’t have that. We believe she was born in the state of every human.

But I thought she was an ordinary human who just wasn’t strongly tempted. People have differing levels of susceptibility to different sins, and I pictured her at the very top of the spectrum, going through life in a bubble.

It makes a difference, to picture Mary as a struggler. Our faith would say that she succeeded in resisting sin, but not without temptation; she succeeded at the cost of a focused effort.

Now I understand one of our hymns which calls her “Queen of War.” That’s the war it’s talking about, the interior war against temptation to sin. Here’s the Kontakion of the Annunciation, and an icon I’d never seen before:

To you our Captain, Queen of war, your people, rescued by your aid from peril, dedicate the battle trophies won as our offering of thanksgiving, O Theotokos. As you have might which none by war can overcome, from all forms of danger you have delivered me, that I may cry to you: "Hail, O virgin, unwedded bride.