Stillness

I'm not sure why I'm drawn to it. Every morning, when I'm milling around the bedroom and half-bath, a certain icon of the Theotokos and Child on the wall between the two rooms (see right) catches my eye. It was given to me after an outdoor Paschal Vespers--I believe right after my chrismation--yet the attachment isn't due to any person associated with the icon. I think what always strikes me is how very still she looks.

Icons, being pictures, are of course going to be stationary. But there's more to it than that. She, being the one whose pure womb, as we sing, became more spacious than the heavens, whose "yes" to the angel loosed the knot that Eve's "no" had tied around us, from whose body came everything our Maker was, humanly speaking--she seems to be the ultimate victor, the blessed and most glorious white martyr, giving her life not in a gory spectacle to the jaws of lions but in a bloodless battle over the temptations and passions that beset her throughout her life, ...

How can this be? For I am a virgin...

...My Son, they have run out of wine...

...Yea, and a sword shall pierce thine own soul, also...

...Woman, behold, thy son...

...Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?...

The anxieties of her life, the sidelong glances of those who suspected she'd been nothing more than a whore whose one-night fling with some Roman soldier had put the horns on her aged fool of a husband, the murmurs and sneers directed at her Boy, the news of whose arrival she'd held precious in her heart ever since that day her messenger came...all of these lay conquered, resolved, dead at the feet of this Lady who, having forfeited all she had (even down to the dignity she might have held in the eyes of men) now holds the Pearl of Great Price in her hands--a pearl she once held in her womb. And this is enough; she rests, satisfied, tranquil, the cry of the victor not being a bloodsoaked shriek of vengeance over ones foes, but rather, "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced..."

My soul doth magnify...

She is what man must be: one who is so enamored with the "one thing needful" that no earthly care can move her. Our minds, on the other hand, roll out of our dreams and right into the tune that's been stuck in our heads since yesterday, and from said tune to the forehead-smacking faux pas at the restaurant last night, and from said blunder to the sexy young thing at the water cooler, and from all the unmentionable things that she brings up to the stiffening, sickening rememberance of the rumor that the company will be downsizing soon, to that bill that got ignored, that phone number that got misplaced, that deadline...all of these thoughts bombard our minds and, unable to stop the juggernaut, we can just feel our soul already tightening miserly around whatever resources, whatever savvy, whatever coping mechanisms might lie within that turnip of a heart that's looking drier with each care that occupies it. The Theotokos, on the other hand, is calm and still.

...and my spirit hath rejoiced...

She is calm not because she is so devoid of worries and cares--a perusal of the gospels and a read-through of the Holy Week lamentations will assure you to the contrary--but because she has discovered that holding all things with an open hand has led her into the reality where Christ reigns, where the Kingdom principle of death leading to resurrection is true, even down to the marrow of our insecurities. She has come to live out that great truth which says that the pulls of passions which our souls and minds feel--the pulls which tell us, as did C.S. Lewis' lizard in The Great Divorce, that we cannot, in fact live without fearing and submitting to that pull--are no match, in the end, for that serene magnifying and rejoicing that makes us human, that giving of glory and thanks that unites us to the divine.