Here’s a passage from my new book, Welcome to the Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity, published by Paraclete Press. This is a passage where I talk about the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, and also about prayer to the saints in general. It’s just very, very difficult for some Protestants.

Orthodox Christians look to Mary, the Theotokos, as our best example for living a Christian life. She is hailed in our hymns as our Captain, our Champion Leader, an active and vigorous heavenly friend. She’s more than a role model, for Christ told St. John at the cross, and us through him, “Behold, your mother” (John 19:27). We’re invited to love her with the affection of a child, and she prays for us as a mother would.

Having said that, you might be shocked by some of the language addressed to her and other saints in Orthodox worship, for it does tend to be effusive. Worship language is often exuberant; it’s not always careful and precise like the language of theological description or a creed would be. It’s more like the speeches made at a rolicking testimonial dinner, where the guests of honor are praised beyond all bounds. When you have something big to express, especially when it’s gratitude, words are bound to fall short. What most people do is add more words, add more extravagant words.

As I was writing this book, the feastday of the Apostle James rolled around—not James, the brother of St. John the Evangelist, but the one who doesn’t get much attention, called James the Less. Nevertheless, the hymn for his feast referred to him as “the most venerable of Jesus’ disciples.” If you asked an Orthodox person, “Whom do you think is the most venerable of the disciples: St. James the Less, right?” she’d be perplexed, even if she’d just sung this line. She might reply, “Why would you think that?” So our worship sometimes sounds over-the-top.

“Save us, O Virgin. You are our only hope.” But we know what we mean. What we mean mostly is: “Pray for us.” We don’t mean that Mary has the power to grant eternal salvation, that she was created differently than other humans, or that she supplied some additional saving factor at the cross. It doesn’t mean that she can or would do anything independently from the will of her Son.

I think that’s where things went wrong in Western Christianity. A thread of devotion took shape that saw Mary as an independent operator, with her own allotment of power. In Tim Perry’s book, Mary for Evangelicals, I ran across a clue about when this began. Perry reviews many writings about Mary, starting from the very beginning of Church history, and eventually comes to a passage by St. Peter Damian, a saintly abbot who was born in Ravenna, Italy, in AD 1007. St. Peter Damian recounts the legend that there was a cleric who, having behaved badly all his life, felt anxiety as death drew near. He appealed to Mary for help, reminding her that, despite his dissolute and negligent life, he had at least faithfully performed her prayers. “You are my witness,” he said, “that seven times a day I praised you, and although I am a sinner, although I am unworthy, I did not cheat you of any of the canonical hours in your honor.”

St. Peter Damian says that he doesn’t know whether the story is true, but he affirms its message. No matter how much a person ignores God’s will and worship, if he consistently offers the appointed prayers to Mary, he will “have the Mother of the Judge as his helper and advocate in his day of need.” That’s from St. Peter Damian, an Italian abbot born in the year 1007. “He will have the Mother of the Judge as helper and advocate in his day of need.”

I don’t know about that. If he’s saying only that Mary will pray for such a one, maybe she does, but the point of the story seems to be that Mary can award salvation to her servants by her own will, independently of God’s judgment. That’s where the trouble crept in, when Mary began to be seen as having power apart from the Trinity. That idea may reflect guesses people made about heaven based on what they knew of earthly empires, that sometimes the mother of the king was even more powerful than he was, and could enact her will over his objections. Not so in heaven, though. Mary is great in heaven precisely because she did and still does the will of the Father in all things.

What about that present tense, though? Even to assume that the Virgin is active in heaven, aware of life on earth and capable of hearing our prayers, requires some groundwork. So let’s ask: Where are the saints now? What are they up to? It’s often been said that Western Christianity focuses on the cross, and Eastern Christianity on the resurrection. Indeed, the most significant truth to Orthodox Christians is “Christ is risen!” We cry out these words hundreds of times, in dozens of languages, in the weeks following Easter Sunday.

It was our own sins that enslaved us. Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death,” and every child of Adam and Eve has since been born with a fatal susceptibility to sin. Bound to pass through the door of death and into the shadowy realm of Hades, there could be no return to paradise, for a cherub with a flaming sword (Genesis 3:24) stood to guard the gates. But God could not bear to see his beloved creatures, made in his own image and likeness, damaged and dying. Christ came to rescue us, putting on our human nature and following our common course, even into the realm of death. That’s a strategy we see in some action movies, where the hero rescues his imprisoned friend by first getting himself arrested.

Here’s some Scriptures that Orthodox look to. Matthew 12:40: “So will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Ephesians 4:9: “He descended into the lower parts of the earth.” 1 Peter 3: 18-20: “Christ was made alive in the spirit, in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey.” 1 Peter 4:6: “The Gospel was preached even to the dead, that, though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God.” Isaiah 24:22: “They shall gather them into a prison, and after many generations they shall be visited.”

Christ went into Hades in the guise of a corpse, but once there he revealed his divinity. He flooded the darkness with his light and power, vanquishing the evil one and setting the captives free. The icon of the resurrection, or in Greek the anastasis, shows Christ victorious in the realm of death.

One of the most compelling examples is a 14th-century fresco in the Church of Chora, near Istanbul. Christ is centered in the image, robed in radiant white, standing on the broken gates of Hades. He is braced and striding, pulling Adam and Eve from their stony tombs, and they come up flying. He grasps them by their wrists, not their hands, for all power streams from him. On one side, King David, King Solomon, and St. John the Forerunner marvel at this wondrous sight; on the other, the righteous of all ages await their turn, with Abel first in line behind his mother. Below Christ’s feet, beneath the fallen gates, is a black pit strewn with broken chains and locks. And there we see the evil one, bound in his own fetters. 1 John 3:8: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”

This victory over death has an immediate, practical application. It means that the departed in Christ are actually not dead. Even now, at this moment, they’re in God’s presence, worshiping before his throne (Revelation 7:9). We on earth still stumble on this continuing battlefield, but they are participating in brilliant peace, illuminated by the light of the Lamb (Revelation 21:23). They see reality more clearly than we do. Their prayers are more effortlessly in tune with God’s will. They are continuously before God’s throne, holding golden bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8).

Those are the simple, yet exhilarating thoughts that caused early believers to turn to the holy departed and ask their intercession. But the idea of praying to saints is still very troubling to many Christians, and I think part of the trouble is precisely in that little word, “pray.” If you had a big prayer need coming up, like a job interview, you might ask others to pray for you. When you ask for the prayers of family and friends, you convey the request by phone or by email. When you ask the saints, you send the request by prayer. Like talking, emailing, or phoning, prayer is a means of communication. Instead of spoken words or typed letters, it takes the form of a directed thought. So a prayer is like an envelope, and you can put different sorts of content inside. If the intended recipient is God, the content may well be worship. If the recipient is a friend among the saints, the content is most likely a request for them to support you in prayer.

The English word “prayer” used to refer to any sort of request. A previous generation might well say to a dinner companion, “I pray thee, pass the broccoli,” but with time the word became restricted to requests made of those in heaven. You’re not worshiping a saint when you make these requests any more than you’re worshiping your friends when you ask for their earthly prayers. It’s like we are standing in a circle of friends before Christ. Usually we speak to him directly, but sometimes we’ll turn to another member of the circle and ask for support. We’ll say, “Put in a good word for me” or “Help me out here.” Such connections don’t diminish our relationship with Christ. If anything, the friendships we form with others who love him, whether living or departed, enrich and strengthen our faith.

I explained this to a Protestant friend once, and she responded, “Thanks all the same, but I’m still going to go to the Lord directly.” I said, “All right, if that’s what you want, I won’t pray for you any more.” You see, if the question is directness, then asking heavenly prayers is no different from asking earthly prayers. The question then becomes: Why should anybody pray for anybody? We could send all our prayers directly to the Lord and not bother with fellow humans. You could even go back another step and ask why we should pray for ourselves. After all, the Lord said (Matthew 6:8), “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” Since God already knows what’s best for us, why should we pester him with our requests?

When you start thinking about the whole matter of prayer, you run into many such tangles. You might feel that you got that job because so many people were praying for you, but that can’t mean you wouldn’t have gotten it if some of them slacked off. It can’t mean that people who have no one to pray for them never receive any blessings. It can’t mean that God won’t listen to prayers until the request-counter rings up a certain number of unique petitioners.

Yet we know that we should pray for our needs; we have no doubt about that. We can see our Lord praise the widow who would not stop importuning a judge for justice (Luke 18:1-8). We’re also supposed to pray for others, since St. James told the sick to call the Church elders to come and minister prayer and anointing (James 5:13-16). If someone asked you, “Why do you ask friends to pray for you? Why don’t you just go to the Lord directly?” or “Why do you pray at all, since God already knows best?” You might have trouble putting an answer into words. Still, it’s clear, if just from the urging in our hearts, that we should come to our Lord with all our worries, for ourselves and for others. He could certainly deal with every case directly, without anyone’s help, without anyone’s asking, but we’re not meant to be solo Christians. We go to heaven together and to hell alone, as a Romanian saying goes.

All that sounds fine, but you may still wonder why we should ask the saints in glory to pray for us. The reason goes back to that earlier point, that they are not dead but alive in heaven and already in constant prayer. We ask them to pray for us because we believe in the resurrection. Imagine that you had a dear friend who’s going through his final illness, who had always been diligent in praying for others. While sitting at his bedside, you might say, “When you come before the throne of God, please pray for me. Don’t stop praying for me.” Likewise when you imagine yourself after death entering God’s presence, don’t you see yourself praying for those you left behind?

The whole universe is more porous than we think. The saints are always before the throne of God. In a mystery, they’re also with us. Hebrews 12:1: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, we are never alone.” That “great cloud” accompanies us in our daily lives and supports us in our spiritual combat. They are our unseen companions, our older brothers and sisters in the faith, whose prayers help us wend our way through this fallen world.

If there is a Christian of ages past whom you particularly admire, whom you feel close to, you can reflect upon the fact that he is alive in the presence of God now, and praying with all the company of the saints. You might keep this companionship in mind as you go through the day, and feel encouraged by it. You could ask him for his prayers and thank him for that help. As with our earthly friends, the company of other believers doesn’t compete with our faith in God, but rather enhances it.

However, don’t focus on that relationship in an unhealthy way. The saint is your fellow companion in Christ, not a substitute for praying directly. The Old Testament warnings about necromancy and seancés are there for a reason. If you keep trying to get information out of the departed, such as knowledge of the future, you will surely experience something, sooner or later—something counterfeit. Earthly and heavenly friends join us in intercession, but our main focus is always on the Lord.