The Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God
Today American news media is much focused on “In what direction will the country go?” “Who will be elected to lead the country?” But in Church we dwell in God’s beyond-time and beyond-space, the dwelling of our Lord. Today is the Feast of the Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God, which stands before us in the middle of Church. To what country does she belong, and how is that country home for us as Orthodox Christians? A Canon asking prayers from the Theotokos reads in part: “O blessed Bride of God, O good soil that grew the Corn untilled and saving to the world, vouchsafe me to be saved by eating it.” She is associated with the good soil of the country of God, of the Body of Christ in the Church. In a secular sense, the word country can mean not only nation but land, such as Pennsylvania Coal Country. Or culture of the land, such as Country music. Or a landscape, such as how we are building our new Church in the country. We are in a sense a country parish in a rural area. The origin of the term country in English goes back to a word with a meaning of that which is spread out around and defining by what is larger than ourselves, that which is contra, the root of the word country. Saints would go out into the wilderness for spiritual lives. Yet rural areas we call the country became also associated with paganism, for the word pagan derived from rural dwellers, implying people outside the holy City of God, His Church. Country can also mean the secular or worldly realm. The countryside needed exorcism from demonic spirits by presence of Christian faith. We pray in our services for what is called “this country” as well.
But to get back to the main question, in what country do we live in as Orthodox Christians? Or better, “What makes a country a home” for us as Orthodox Christians? The best version of that question is to flip it to “Who makes a country a home?” Because the answer is our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ and His body the Orthodox Church, from the good soil of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos. In that sense, as we empty ourselves in Him, we become the settlers and frontiers people of a new Orthodox country.
Let us take the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, before us and commemorated today, as an example of how the country of Orthodoxy, a landscape of our lives, the networked story of our lives, even as Americans, embedded in Orthodox Christian Tradition, makes country a home for us as Orthodox Christians in the deepest way. The Church makes our lives meaningful and provides a dwelling for us on earth and a gateway back to Paradise and beyond to the heavenly kingdom that comes out to us from these royal doors at each Liturgy when the Eucharist comes forth, the Body and Blood of Christ.
We commemorate today the appearance of the Kazan Icon in 1579. Today’s feast follows a week in which we commemorated the Holy Royal Martyrs of Russia and the uncovering of the relics of both St. Sergius of Radonezh and the Synaxis of Radonezh saints. All these feasts this past week have in common a sharing of landscape, of country, rooted in Orthodox Christian faith and culture, and the oneness of the landscape of holy saints with our sense of country as Orthodox Christians worldwide. But this is not primarily a Russian ethnic landscape, although it is that too, but one in the Church that is also for us Americans. For example, the Holy Royal Martyrs and St. Sergius are celebrated on July 17 on the civil calendar, but note that that is the Fourth of July on the Julian calendar. St. Sergius went into the woods, the wilderness of the forest called the desert, much like the remnants of the historic woods called Pennsylvania or Penns Woods, with our new temple on the border of still vast lands of state and private forests. They are our saints too as American Orthodox Christians.
Likewise, while the Kazan Icon is known as the Holy Protectress of the Russian land, she is also our Protectress today in Northern Appalachia, as we worship her Son and partake of His body and blood. Tradition has it that the icon originally came from Constantinople in the 13th century, modeled on the icon of the Directress written even earlier by the Holy Evangelist Luke. Hidden from the Tatars in 1438, after a fire destroyed Kazan in 1579, the Theotokos in a vision revealed to 10-year-old Matrona the location of the hidden icon. Russian military commanders credited the invocation of the Theotokos through the icon with helping Russia to repel Polish Catholic invasion, Swedish Protestant, and Napoleonic secular invasions of their homeland. Nine or ten separate miracle-working copies of the icon became known around Russia. Reportedly, one was used in processions around Leningrad fortifications during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazis.
But the original icon in Kazan disappeared in 1904 in a robbery. Many saw that disappearance as a sign of national tragedies to come. What today is considered the main surviving image of the icon some call a 16th century copy stolen from St. Petersburg during the Revolution, and some call the recovered original. It ended up for a time in the Vatican until finally returned to Russia in 2004. The icon is now enshrined on the site where the original icon was found. The icon has re-taken her place among the many Churches and monasteries of Russia rebuilt in the incredible renewal of Orthodox landscape in which church bells again ring out over the land.
The continuing mysterious and wonderworking story, presence, and return of the Kazan icon embodies Russian spiritual tradition and Russian culture of the homeland. But such an Orthodox landscape lies hidden too in places like England. Our dear Father Theodore from Jordanville, whom God has placed in England at least temporarily, wrote me for my name’s day recently that he is leading pilgrimages on foot by faithful to sites of the ancient Anglo-Saxon Orthodox Church, such as St. Alban’s. We are growing such a landscape of faithfulness too in America. We have our wonderworking icons, such as the myrrh-streaming Hawaiian Iverson icon, which regularly visits our cathedral in Mayfield and elsewhere, and the myrrh-streaming Kardiotissa icon of Taylor, Pennsylvania. In addition, the recent Glorified in America book published by Jordanville uncovers the history of the holy saints brought forth in this American land, commemorated last week. The documentary Sacred Alaska, which we plan to show at the Campus Theatre Sept. 8, shows the Orthodox country of Alaska. Orthodox monasteries have grown across America in the last generation, including Holy Protection Monastery in the Poconos, one of 17 founded by the saintly Elder Ephraim, which influenced the original name of our mission. Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia, a mainly English-speaking monastic community in ROCOR within a day’s drive, is developing Orthodox hymnography in Appalachian style. Our parish is a humble example too of the spread of small missions across the American land inspired by the Russian tradition of ascetic and hesychastic Orthodoxy. We need ever to continue making ourselves know our home in this landscape of piety and holiness in America, through devotion to our little churches at our family icon corners, in processions through the streets of towns such as Lewisburg and in blessing the Susquehanna River as our mission began doing this past Theophany.
We need to bring out the Orthodox landscape of America. We do this by remembering how Jesus Christ said “I am the way the truth and the life.” Orthodoxy means not only right teaching but right glorifying, living “the way.” Before becoming Orthodox, I spent much time searching for my roots. Like many Americans, and many in the modern world at large, I felt rootless and ungrounded. I used to like going back to the Scandinavian neighborhood of my mother’s family, and to heretical Christian congregations associated with my family’s mixed backgrounds. I even went on leave from work for a year to study in Wales and look for Celtic roots. I studied Old English to find English roots and Irish language and early literature to find Irish roots. But I was ever more rootless while looking for my roots!
However, once I began attending a Greek Orthodox Church, my quest for finding a vanished or non-existent “country of belonging” ended. I found the landscape of the Orthodox Christian faith in the iconography depicting our spiritual family, realizing how in the body of Christ we are grafted into all the genealogies and lands of Holy Scripture, and how they are with us here and now where we come to take the Eucharist in this portal to heaven. What Shakespeare called the undiscovered country of the after-life is really the otherworldly yet present uncreated energies of God within us in the holy saints and mysteries of the Church. There were all kinds of spiritual connections of the heart opened to me through the Saints of Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic lands as well as of Russia with Viking links too. The desire for home is a desire for Paradise, and it can never be fulfilled except in our self-emptying in Jesus Christ in the mystical unity or sobornost of the Church and the prayer of the heart.
This past week I, a sinful priest, experienced a birthday in the world, yet for all my searching for roots, I unworthily find my real birthday in the day I was baptized into Christ 25 years ago this summer. In the quarter century since, God restored and renewed to me a sense of family, home and landscape in the Orthodox Church, the Body of Christ, and in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, which keeps alive the ascetic Orthodox tradition of Russian monasticism and prayer that was brought here in exile from Communism. This summer marks the 25th anniversary of my baptism, and also marks the first anniversary of my ordination most unworthily as an Orthodox priest.
Here in Northern Appalachia, let us bring forth the garden of Orthodoxy, an Orthodox home and neighborhood and landscape, starting with our humble temple and cemetery and plantings both spiritual and physical, forming a network with Orthodox missionary work throughout America, hidden yet appearing more and more. What does it mean to be a native Orthodox Christian in America, to be born again into the faith of our fathers going all the way back to Adam and Eve through Christ? Daily prayers, morning and evening, and throughout the day the Jesus prayer, reading the Gospel each day, saints’ lives, and the Church fathers; participating in as many worship services as possible, and feeling the spark of God’s love in our heart that is the natural supernatural law of uncreated grace in Orthodox Christianity. That homeland and otherworld combined are the Church, the Body of Christ. We aspire to live in her, and may we in community find our graves with her, even in the little cemetery by our country temple. This is what makes country home. May the Mother of God through her Kazan Icon intercede for us so that we may continue to grow her garden through God’s grace, and to ourselves grow and bloom in the garden of the Theotokos, the Church that is the Body of Christ. Amen.