Derzhavnaya bogoroditsa?

[Olga Meerson]

Orthodox Church in America is NOT a Russian Church. For the past 30 to 40 years -- a full generation for ecclesiastical life -- 99% of its parishes have been in English entirely, and the original Greek Theotokos is the standard liturgical word they use, in English, for Bogoroditsa in Slavonic. I belong to that Church and have been a priest's wife in it for the past 31 years, and also a choir director (fully bilingual, using English translations that weren't mine own at all, and most of them, not from Slavonic but from Greek), on and off, for the same amount of time. Full liturgical text compendia in English are available at St. Vladimir's Press. There are many competitors for versions of these in English (let alone in England), but these (the St. Vlad's) are the texts the OCA has been using for ages. We have at least one classic liturgist standing behind those texts, in English. That is Schmemann. The fact that Will Ryan or anyone else in this country may be surprised at the!
  relatively frequent use of the word Theotokos in English stems from these people's lack of acquaintance with American Orthodox believers' liturgical texts, not from any rare or obscure use of these texts in these believers' own lives. Theotokos is THE word for the Mother of God in OCA, in English. Of course, I cannot vouch for the Antiochian Church, but the Greeks here easily (if not uniformally) use the same word--for the obvious reason that it is in their own language! 
Googling things, or using wikipedia, is not always the most reliable thing for information that should be accessible from personal, everyday living experience--of which liturgical life is a perfect example. No person will ever know as much ABOUT liturgical life as those LIVING it and thus knowing it first hand. English speaking Orthodox believers in the OCA know the Mother of God as the Theotokos. Come to any Orthodox parish in the OCA, and you will hear this word all the time. For example, in the hymn we repeat most often--the Magnificat, or the standard zadostojnik (достойно есть... or Честнейшую херувим...), "More honorable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim, without defilement you gave birth to god the Word, true Theotokos, we magnify you". Clearly, anyone who doubts the use of this word for the mother of God has never attended ANY service in English at the OCA, as the word is used in all of them, and many ti!
 mes over.

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