The weeping of the icons

The icons of the Theotokos are weeping. They are doing so at the churches of two of my priest-friends.

At one place, a young boy noticed the strange gleaming, streaming down the face and robes of the Mother of God, during the Great Entrance. The choir was singing "We who mystically represent the Cherubim ..." My friend heard the shuffling of feet behind him, as one side of the church crossed the aisle, in irresistable wonder, to see better.

At the place of my other friend, the oil cannot be contained, and needs to be soaked up by cotton.

In both places, my friends refuse to publish press releases. In fact, they avoid media attention altogether, rightly fearful of the spectacle that the News would bring. One can only imagine: apparition-seekers, professional skeptics, celebrity-addicts. "Did you hear in one place a man was arrested with paint in his bag?" my friend told me, with no small anxiety. "The man was going to throw it on the miraculous icon, to stop the weeping."

So the news gets out through informal channels, much like the messianic secret, and the attendant miracles, resonate like fire through the networks of family and neighbors. And the people now enter these places with a hush, with aching curiosity, that in this time of doubt there would be something, still, that is obvious, but cannot be figured out.

Of course, the miracle remains despite the comic flesh-and-blood cycle proceeding around it. In both places, hunkiness obtains -- and some of you know exactly what I mean. Despite the pastor's poignant plea to venerate with reverential care, some have rushed to the icon, wiping it childishly with their palm and smearing their faces in a rush. Some have begrudged the amount others have gained, thinking that the blessing can be quantified, measured out, like a cash economy. Some have wondered why the same miracle doesn't happen in their more deserving places, as if God should follow an objective criteria of grace and blessing.

My friend complained that one of his colleagues even wondered, aloud, in front of the laity: "What omen is this? What bad thing is about to occur? Hundreds of icons wept like this in Russia before the Revolution came."

That last remark is not exactly, historically true. But nonetheless, it is a native thing to interpret the supernatural as doom. I have heard this sort of thing frequently. I also hear it in my head.

Signs, first of all, always impend the other-ness of God. Other-ness, especially the numinous sort, is always upsetting, even to the faithful. Familiarity is nice, mainly because it exists wholly within the extrapolations of past experience. Everything familiar is completely predictable, understandable, categorize-able, and -- best of all -- define-able.

Weeping icons are never familiar.

Signs are wild. They haunt the daylight and lurk in dreams. They are heavier and more substantial than the common mass of the world. I think old men dream dreams, and young men see visions, in the before and after and sideways of Signs. 

They are also offensive and scandalous. If these weeping icons are true (and I believe they are), then there are some troubling implications. I would never advocate the scientific observation of or experiementation with them, but consider this "thought experiment." Imagine that one of these weeping icons had been weighed before the onset of the miraclous exuding of the oil. 

Then, after the weeping, collect all the miraculous oil, until the icon is completely dry.

Weigh the oil (or "chrism," or "myron"). Weigh the icon.

The oil will possess an observable, weighable mass.

So will the icon: but the weight of it will not have changed from its "pre-miracle" weight.

Which raises the question: where did the mass of the oil come from?

Indeed, most people presume -- as a "default" presumption -- that the oil somehow seeped from the depths of the wood or the many layers of the icon painting. Surely, some condensation exuded from the "building up" process of icon writing?

And yet, if this experiment would be performed, no such loss of mass would be observed.

There are variables, I'm sure, that may not be so easily observed, and these variables I think are provided by God so that skeptics may not have their sensibilities overthrown so ruinously. Wood in various levels of humidity will absorb water. And, it may be possible that various condensates from the atmosphere, reacting to the surface of the icon, can form as beads of "perspiration."

As I said, I am happy that these "escape" clauses exist for the sake of materialists who God would not want to be so broken.

Yet, I am more than willing to accept the limits of materialist predicates. I am also willing to accept the inadequacy of mathematical and physical laws: Godel's Theorem itself suggests that mathematics cannot sufficiently explain itself. And if it cannot, neither can any science.

So we are left with the icons that weep, and a sign to be accepted or rejected. A sign that is manifested, largely independent of appropriate or boorish behavior. 

It is affected by faith. I know of one instance where a weeping icon was placed on an analogion before the people. But because some were so bitter and unforgiving in the audience, the icon ceased to weep, and only began to manifest the sign again when it was returned to an atmosphere of faith.

I wonder. I wonder why this sign of myrrh-gushing is so substantially linked to the intercessory ministry of the Theotokos, the Mother of God? Is it necessarily "weeping"? Is the Theotokos grieving, like Rachel, for her children sinking into exile? Mourning because her family is so strung out by the pallid mists of the prince of the air?

I wonder, too, how this iconic myrrh-gushing is related to the myrrh-gushing of the relics of the saints -- like the oils of Demetrios and Nicholas, in Thessolonika and Bari? Is there some eschatological mystery? Is there a harbinger of the succession of societies and cultures?

Which I happen to think.

They make me wonder, these icons, with the hair raised on the back of my neck and my skin chilled by the frisson of mysterium tremens: I do not doubt that the Theotokos holds nothing but maternity toward us, and that Christ her Son is Shepherd, Samaritan and Friend.

This I do not doubt: I quickly believe every story of miraculous healing, especially in conjunction with appearance of this miraculous myrrh. One little girl, in a certain place, told her mother during Divine Liturgy that the Theotokos was crying. 

It was the great icon of the Theotokos in the apse above the Altar, in the dome. And the oil was dropping straight onto the floor. The priest collected the oil. After Liturgy, he anointed the girl.

At that hour, the girl was delivered of her cancer, and the weeping ceased.

So I interpret the sign of the icons weeping as Christ caring for His own, but signaling to the world that it is being judged.

This dual meaning is a hard dichotomy for us, for we are asked a question with which the first generations of the Church knew very well. Perhaps successive moments in history, particulary after Constantine, forgot the scandal of the question.

But it would be good to serve it up again.

Look at the weeping icon. She asks this:

"Will you trust Him? The God Who is love, but Who is also terrible?"

Comments

[FrGregACCA]

The terror that God inspires, the awe, is in fact the terror and awe that pure and infinite Love must inevitably induce in sinful creatures in whom love has yet to be perfected.

We would all, to one degree or another, say with Peter to the Lord, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man."

[Anonymous Believer]

I just viewed two weeping icons this past week during Russian Christmas on the East Coast in a Russian Orthodox Church. Had I not seen them for myself, I certainly would be a 'doubting Thomas.' Simply amazing and God-awesome.