The story goes that on August 16, 1239, Prince Vasily was hunting alone in the forest when he came across an icon of the Mother of God standing upright in the thicket. When he reached out to touch the image, it disappeared. Awestruck, he told the people of the city of his discovery and they returned with him to the exact spot in the forest where they found the icon as he had. Overjoyed, (who wouldn't be) they transported the icon to the Cathedral of the Assumption. The icon is still revered even to today.
These legends surrounding the discoveries of icons all begin to sound alike after you've read three or four of them. That doesn't matter, in each there is some word or phrase that seems to jump out to offer us some spiritual insight.
The prince found the icon in the thicket. A thicket is a dense growth of bushes or trees, thorns and brambles. Small animals hide in the thicket or like the ram in the story of Abraham getting ready to sacrifice son-Isaac, we can get caught in the thicket. Jeremiah the Prophet (4:7) tells us that danger can lurk in the thicket.
The lion is up from his thicket
the destroyer of nations is on his way,
he has come from his home
to reduce your land to a desert;
your towns will be in ruins, uninhabited.
Like forest and fog, sometimes the thicket can be an image of our personal or communal inner state. Prince Vasily perhaps reached out to heaven from the thicket of what, we don't know: his vanity, pride, power-quest, anger, selfishness? We can come before the icon of the Feodorovskaya Mother of God here, from the thicket of our own inner emotion, where we might be stuck or hiding. Or perhaps we sense something dark or dangerous lurking within. Pray we know ourselves well enough to identify it. Then our prayer can be real, coming from a felt place.
Mother of God,
appear before me in the thicket of my emotions,
my anxieties,
my exhausting need to control,
my rambling and fruitless thoughts,
my inappropriate attractions
and the desire to possess.
Mother of God,
find me in the thicket
where negative belief lurks -
that comfortable religion of
judging and
demarcating.
criticizing,
pronouncing and
condemning.
Unleash a love in me
that takes the world into my heart,
wishing only wholeness,
healing,
salvation and good
for each.
Father Stephen Morris
The lion is up from his thicket
the destroyer of nations is on his way,
he has come from his home
to reduce your land to a desert;
your towns will be in ruins, uninhabited.
Like forest and fog, sometimes the thicket can be an image of our personal or communal inner state. Prince Vasily perhaps reached out to heaven from the thicket of what, we don't know: his vanity, pride, power-quest, anger, selfishness? We can come before the icon of the Feodorovskaya Mother of God here, from the thicket of our own inner emotion, where we might be stuck or hiding. Or perhaps we sense something dark or dangerous lurking within. Pray we know ourselves well enough to identify it. Then our prayer can be real, coming from a felt place.
Mother of God,
appear before me in the thicket of my emotions,
my anxieties,
my exhausting need to control,
my rambling and fruitless thoughts,
my inappropriate attractions
and the desire to possess.
Mother of God,
find me in the thicket
where negative belief lurks -
that comfortable religion of
judging and
demarcating.
criticizing,
pronouncing and
condemning.
Unleash a love in me
that takes the world into my heart,
wishing only wholeness,
healing,
salvation and good
for each.
Father Stephen Morris
