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| Galaktotrophousa ~ Mother of God Nursing |
MANY ICONS COME TO US with tales of their creation, their wondrous discovery or transport, how miracles were wrought by their presence or monasteries and convents grew up around them.
Saint Sabbas the Sanctified (+532) predicted on his death bed that another monk, also named Sabbas, would appear one day as a visitor to their monastery outside Jerusalem and that the Milk~Giver icon at that time should be given to him.
The story continues "the next six centuries rushed by" (perhaps a poetic way of saying that time means nothing to good monks) and in the 13th century, Saint Sabbas the Archbishop of Serbia arrived in Palestine. The monks related to Sabbas the story that had been handed down for centuries, fulfilling the holy founders prophecy entrusting the Milk~Giver icon to his care.
Along his return trip to Serbia, Sabbas stopped in Greece where he visited the Hilander Monastery, evidently giving the icon to the monks there. Eight centuries later the icon still resides in a kellion there (a sub-community of six or seven monks) attached to that monastic community. But I believe there is more!
The ancient Greeks believed there were four libations (liquid gifts offered to the gods: oil, water, honey and milk). But now in Christ, there is a great reversal as God offers us - humankind - the milk of God's wisdom and truth.
Wisdom is not at all the same as being smart, or being able to solve problems or give good advice, or being old and having good sense solutions drawn from long life experience.
Like new-born babies all your longing should be for milk - the unadulterated spiritual milk - which will help you to grow up to salvation, at any rate if you have tasted that the Lord is good. (1 Peter 2:2)
Wisdom is not at all the same as being smart, or being able to solve problems or give good advice, or being old and having good sense solutions drawn from long life experience.
Wisdom is having insights into God's mind. And God has gone to a great deal of trouble to share God's mind with us in Christ. And truth is closely linked to this wisdom. But truth is not trends and fads, advertisements and the newly elected, the top ten list, the winners, what's in, what the experts say, what the guarantees promise.
God's truth first has to do with my becoming a newly conscious person. It is bigger than simply nodding my head to dogma
"But let the complete renewal of your minds transform you, so that you may discern for yourselves what is the will of God ~ what is good and acceptable and mature." (Romans 12:2)
Another translation says: "But let God re-make you so that your whole attitude of mind is changed."
And this re-making and renewal of our minds might express itself first of all in a radical embracing of the truth of the Incarnation - the abandonment of the limiting separations we create between God and us, and the abandonment of the destructive separations we create between and among humans.
Over the door of a friend's church there is a stained glass window of angels holding an open scroll which reads: Porta Caeli (Door of Heaven). I don't deny it, but I would suggest that the same sign could appear over the door leading into the doctor's waiting room, or the door leading into the Motor Vehicle office! YIKES!
Instead of flipping through old issues of People or watching the awful and too loud TV suspended from the wall, could I imagine personal prayers for each of the people waiting along with me. There's the renewed (re-made) mind!
Lord, that woman looks so tired...
Lord, that man is so crabby towards his wife...
Lord, that mom looks so worried about her child...
Instead of worry, fear and demonizing complaints I can send blessings and prayers of help, healing and strengthening to the ISIS militants, the Ebola sufferers and helpers, the President whose job is unspeakably difficult, the pro-democracy students of Hong Kong and the police who drive them back, the homeless teens in Ocean Beach, California. The new mind is a kind of waking up - no more separations, no more dividing distinctions between humans.
And Saint Benedict says in his monastic rule, "Treat the garden and kitchen tools as carefully as you treat the sacred chalice used at Mass." No more separations between God and humankind.
in the kellion at Athos
where monks alone admire you ~
fly now on techno-wings
around our dry world
nourishing us all with the
abundant milk of divine
wisdom and truth.
