Today is the feast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple.

Troparion

Today is the prelude of the good will of God,
of the preaching of the salvation of mankind.
The Virgin appears in the Temple of God,
in anticipation proclaiming Christ to all.
Let us rejoice and sing to her:
“Rejoice, O Fulfillment of the Creator’s dispensation.”

Kontakion    

The most pure Temple of the Savior;
the precious Chamber and Virgin;
the sacred Treasure of the glory of God,
is presented today to the house of the Lord.
She brings with her the grace of the Spirit,
therefore, the Angels of God praise her:
“Truly this woman is the abode of Heaven.”

~*~*~

The Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple
(November 21)

It seems thousands of years removed from us, but it was not so very
long ago that life was marked out by religious feasts. Although
everyone went to church, not everyone, of course, knew the exact
contents of each celebration. For many, perhaps even the majority, the
feast was above all an opportunity to get a good sleep, eat well,
drink and relax. And nevertheless, I think that each person felt, if
not fully consciously, that something transcendent and radiant broke
into life with each feast, bringing an encounter with a world of
different realities, a reminder of something forgotten, of something
drowned out by the routine, emptiness and weariness of daily life.

Consider the very names of the feasts: Entrance into the Temple,
Nativity, Epiphany, Presentation, Transfiguration. These words alone,
in their solemnity, their unrelatedness to daily life and their
mysterious beauty awakened some forgotten memory, invited, pointed to
something. The feast was a kind of longing sigh for a lost but
beckoning beauty, a sigh for some other way of living.

Our modern world, however, has become monotonous and feastless. Even
our secular holidays are unable to hide this settling ash of sadness
and hopelessness, for the essence of celebration is this breaking in,
this experience of being caught up into a different reality, into a
world of spiritual beauty and light. If, however, this reality does
not exist, if fundamentally there is nothing to celebrate, then no
manner of artificial uplift will be capable of creating a feast.

Here we have the feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the
Temple. Its subject is very simple: a little girl is brought by her
parents to the temple in Jerusalem. There is nothing particularly
remarkable about this, since at that time it was a generally accepted
custom and many parents brought their children to the temple as a sign
of bringing them into contact with God, of giving their lives ultimate
purpose and meaning, of illumining them from within through the light
of higher experience.

But on this occasion, as the service for the day recounts, they lead
the child to the “Holy of Holies,” to the place where no one except
the priests are allowed to go, the mystical inner sanctum of the
temple. The girl’s name is Mary. She is the future mother of Jesus
Christ, the one through whom, as Christians believe, God himself came
into the world to join the human race, to share its life and reveal
its divine content. Are these just fairy tales? Or is something given
to us and disclosed here, something directly related to our life,
which perhaps cannot be expressed in everyday human speech?

Here was this magnificent, massive, solemn temple, the glory of
Jerusalem. And for centuries it was only there, behind those heavy
walls, that a person could come into contact with God. Now, however,
the priest takes Mary by the hand, leads her into the most sacred part
of the Temple and we sing that “The most pure Temple of the Savior is
led into the temple of the Lord.” Later in the Gospels Christ said,
“destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,” but as the
Evangelist added, “He spoke of the temple of His Body” (Jn 2: 19, 21).

The meaning of all these events, words and recollections is simple:
from now on man himself becomes the temple. No stone temple, no altar,
but man — his soul, body and life — is the sacred and divine heart
of the world, its “holy of holies.” One temple, Mary — living and
human — is led into a temple made of stone, and from within brings to
completion its significance and meaning.

With this event religion, and life even more so, undergoes a complete
shift in balance. What now enters the world is a teaching that puts
nothing higher than man, for God Himself takes on human form to reveal
man’s vocation and meaning as divine. >From this moment onward man is
free. Nothing stands over him, for the very world is his as a gift
from God to fulfill his divine destiny.

From the moment the Virgin Mary entered “the Holy of Holies,” life
itself became the Temple. And when we celebrate her Entrance into the
Temple, we celebrate man’s divine meaning and the brightness of his
high calling. These cannot be washed away or uprooted from human
memory.

~ Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann