https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mbtBJ5w_l0U
I saw some church fathers held that Mary symbolically fulfills the role of the Ark of the Covenant. What is the Orthodox understanding of the parallels between Mary and the Ark? Yeah, for sure. Mary is the Ark. Mary is all the places of epiphany. All the places where God manifests himself, you’ll see people using Marian imagery to talk about that in the sense that in the Old Testament, every place of revelation is an image of Mary as the ultimate personal revelation, as the bringing of that revelation into the heart. And so not just the Ark, but the Ark, the Tabernacle, the Paradise even, the Mountain, sometimes the Ladder. And it’s funny because the Ladder seems to be, seems you can understand it as being masculine or feminine. It depends because there’s the road and there’s the way. It’s like the Mother of God is the road and Christ is the way. So you can have the Ladder can be the Mother of God, but ascending the Ladder and descending the Ladder could be Christ. Every aspect of revelation has those two aspects, there’s a masculine, feminine aspect, the glory and the Ark, and the glory and the Tabernacle, the Temple, and then she’s also Jerusalem. She’s all these things. She’s also the earth itself. All the places of manifestation are related to the Mother of God. Last week we celebrated the entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, and I was paying really paying attention to some of the readings during the services and my goodness, it’s all there guys. It’s so amazing. The services in the church just have so much to offer. I mean it was like she was the heavenly temple and there was the heavenly Tabernacle and there was all these things about her. It was really, it’s really wonderful. You