This icon of the Prousiotissa Mother of God had its feast day celebrated on the Eastern Church calendar — June 23. The Mother of God is spiritually wide-eyed and awake to her Infant Son who appears as a little man. Jesus is always the Lord whose message is, stay awake. "Wake up from your sleep, climb out of your coffins. Christ will show you the light." Ephesians 5:14. She is the first disciple who patterns this soul-disposition for us.
The icon's traditional story is regrettably full of dread, paralysis and a dis-empowering fear of God. In the account, when the Holy Mother performs wonders, the people thank her with gifts of gold and silver. Wouldn't converted hearts please her more? How it is that we settle for distortion, the shrinking of God and ourselves? The world, weary with violence and death, hopes for a message that is fresh, relevant and genuinely spiritual.
Notice the Mother of God looks out at us, proposing a personal and interior involvement. In truth, the Prousiotissa Icon is a story about the curing of a deadly virus, a plague-like influenza. Of course, we think of our own time of Coronavirus epidemic. But I'd suggest there's more. There is also the epidemic of too much thinking and talking in religion. I sometimes wonder if I am alone in feeling like a talking head at the end of Mass. What happens to awe (even ecstasy) when there's only talking?
I remember in my first year of seminary there was mandatory 7:00 A.M. meditation. We knelt in rows facing forward while a priest in the rear of the chapel talked us through our meditation for an hour. You could hear elbows and heads clunking off the kneelers.
As the icon appears here on our screens, might I propose a new prayer which pays attention to her nimbus (halo). Let's not think the nimbus is just decoration. Heaven keep us from the religion of decoration, especially decorative talking and thinking.
Your nimbus, O Lady,
filled with swirling
clouds of unknowing —
the inner darkness,
pious imaginings,
fanciful God-knowledge,
the voluminous study of
what everyone else has said,
the keep-you-in-a-box of God-cliches,
the tidy, "just believe it," religion...
like tree-top birds,
wide-winged,
currant riding birds
kept in cages.
Pierce with
a bowing love,
a hushed love,
the amorphous cloud-thoughts
shrinking the vastness,
claiming to know.
