Prayers to the Theotokos
Θεοτόκος — Theotokos · theh-oh-TOH-kos
In brief
After the Trinity, no one is addressed in Orthodox prayer more often than the Virgin Mary, whom the Church calls the Theotokos — the "Birth-giver of God." Orthodox Christians do not worship her; they ask her prayers, as one asks a beloved friend to pray, and they honor her as the first and greatest of the saved. A handful of short Marian prayers recur many times a day, and longer services of supplication — above all the Paraklesis — carry the same appeal into times of need.
Why the Church prays to Mary
A newcomer is sometimes startled by how much Orthodox prayer turns to the Mother of God. The reason is not that she rivals Christ but that she is the nearest human being to Him: the one who gave Him His flesh, stood by His Cross, and now, the Church believes, prays for the world with a mother's boldness. To ask her prayers is no different in kind from asking a living Christian to pray for you — it is intercession, not adoration. The Church is careful about the difference: to God alone belongs worship (latreia); to the saints and to the Theotokos above them belongs honor and veneration (proskynesis), a distinction the Church defended by name at the Seventh Council (more here).
Scripture itself begins the pattern. The angel Gabriel greets her, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee" (Luke 1:28); her kinswoman Elizabeth adds, "Blessed art thou among women" (Luke 1:42); and Mary herself prophesies that "all generations shall call me blessed" (Luke 1:48). Orthodox Marian prayer is largely the Church doing exactly that — taking the words Scripture already gave her and returning them to her in love.
The everyday prayers
The most familiar is the short hymn woven from those Gospel greetings, sung three times at the close of Great Vespers and prayed daily at home: "O Theotokos and Virgin, rejoice, Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, for thou hast borne the Savior of our souls." A second, prayed constantly in the services, is the hymn Axion Estin — "It is truly meet to bless you, O Theotokos, ever-blessed and most pure, and the Mother of our God." A third, "Beneath thy compassion we take refuge, O Theotokos," is by tradition the oldest Marian prayer known, generally dated to the third century.
For longer supplication the Church turns to the Paraklesis — literally a "consolation" or supplication — a canon of psalms, hymns, and petitions to the Theotokos sung in times of sorrow, sickness, or need, and every evening through the first two weeks of the Dormition Fast. It belongs to the wider family of intercessory services (molieben and paraklesis). Longer still is the Akathist hymn — twenty-four stanzas of praise sung standing — whose refrain, "Rejoice, O Bride unwedded," the Orthodox world has chanted for some fourteen centuries.
Where they fit in daily life
These prayers are not reserved for clergy or feast days. They sit in every Orthodox prayer book among the morning and evening prayers, and most households keep an icon corner with an image of the Theotokos before which they are said. A common counsel to beginners is to start small — the short "O Theotokos and Virgin" once in the morning and evening — and let it grow. The point is not quantity but relationship: to live, as the beloved disciple did after the Cross, in a home where the Mother of the Lord is honored and near. "Behold thy mother," Christ said from the Cross (John 19:27); the Church has taken the word as spoken to all His disciples.