Pertaining to the issue that elicited your response at that very moment, which was Mary and Joseph being married and raising a family, like "normal" families would do, how do EO differ from RC on this matter.
Protestants assume that being married and raising a family include, well, bedroom duties, of the sort that the procreative and a unitive aspects of marriage include.
I do not know if the teaching exists in the Latin Church commonly, that one central feature of this arrangement was concealment... Christ had to be hidden... It started out more directly with the goodness of Joseph in permitting the Blessed Virgin to live with him as his wife, for he was a widower with his own family to attend, and a wife, even one around the same age as his own children, would be seen as normal... No one would have to know that the reason for the marriage was for the sake of the preservation of the Virgin from marital relations... Coming into the age of procreation, she could no longer live in the Temple as she had done...
Then the twist, for she shows up pregnant... And Joseph wants to just quietly and decently set her aside... But no, that won't work, as the Angel tells him in a dream... So he takes her as his wife and raises the Child as his own... Continuing the deception... And fleeing to Egypt... To protect the Child from harm...
Then years later returning up from down in Egypt... From which Moses began, you see... And the deception continued as Jesus grew to adulthood, and was so successful that when He came to His home town, He could do very few miracles, because they all knew him as Joseph's kid, and "Nice of ya t'visit us again, kid..." The whole of it was for the sake of a not unsuccessful deception to enable the Incarnation of the Logos INTO His Own creation without Him getting destroyed before completing His Purpose here... "It is finished..." He said on the Cross... Mission accomplished... Now can Jesus die...
Are you, as an EO, not "off the rails" in this kind of devotion to her too?
I would hope so - Heck, I would like to think so... But I am a faithless old salty-dog sail-boat loving and fumbling excuse of a human being, so that...
But wait! You asked me as an Orthodox Christian!
We are not dogmatically off the rails, as we understand the Latins to be, for they have deified Mary in a manner that takes Her deification, toward which we all aspire, to be of no effect for us... Because, you see, in your view, she was immaculately conceived, and not even one of us was so conceived... So that she gave to Christ an immaculately conceived body, and not a normally conceived one, if so, His healing only applies to immaculately conceived human beings, and cannot apply to me... "For in sins did my mother bear me..."
And by so understanding her, you see, you forsake the basis of Her Life that prepared her, by the time of the onset of her child-bearing years, for the bearing of Christ in Her Virgin Womb... She DID prepare for that event, you see... And from Her Christ took our fallen and Death-laden humanity unto Himself and by His Life as the Son of Man and God, He healed our humanity in His Own Flesh...
She was a uniquely extraordinary human being, you see, just like you and me, but utterly beyond us as a person, fully draped in the Fall of Adam in which we are all born, yet by Her greatness of person keeping herself from impurity, being prepared in this manner to enter into the Temple and finding Her Home there at less than 4 years of age...
Your confession has as dogma that She did this because of Her Immaculate Conception, and we say She did so because of Her extraordinary deeds... You see, we can also do extraordinary deeds, and sometimes do so... Thereby walking somewhat as She did... But no one is ever able to be immaculately conceived...
Thank you for your love for Her, however our differences in understanding Her may diverge...
Arsenios