Sensitive content: Please be aware that this story contains themes of miscarriage and loss.
I wasn’t Orthodox yet when this happened. I’d retired after years of teaching and school leadership, spending quiet time contemplating my next step and discerning a call from God, unsure what that would mean and what it would look like. I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon with my adult son to see the exhibition Byzantium: Faith and Power. I wanted to see the beautiful material culture of Eastern Christianity, more for the art than for any spiritual awakening.
At the entrance to the exhibit, a group of Orthodox clergy in elaborate vestments were talking with a museum guide and gently swinging the hanging overhead lanterns, casting soft shadows and silhouettes across the room. The museum galleries were spaces for appreciation and study. They were also spaces that contained holy objects.
I browsed through items created for prayer, liturgical, and ceremonial use, among them fine fabrics, beautifully illustrated texts, finely crafted silver altar pieces, and, of course, icons. I was struck by the quiet, softly lit atmosphere, each item displayed, cataloged, and explained, carefully curated by scholars and museum professionals. And yet, it seemed like church. Visitors were absorbed in contemplation as though caught up in the beauty around them, the skill and dedication of the artisans’ work, all to the glory of God and the Church.
I walked through the galleries and then turned a corner. I stopped, suddenly. There she was, the Sorrowful Madonna, lamenting. Her head was turned away from me and tilted so I could see her eyes, partly hidden beneath sharply raised eyebrows and veiled behind the kind of swollen dark circles that arise from ceaseless crying–one strains to see her eyes in their soft hollows. The tears that will flow from these eyes probably seem like they will never end. Her eyes look down, barely open, yet somehow they seem to behold an internal image of a sadness so profound that image and emotion become one deeply resonant impression. Her long nose follows the tilt of her head; her full lips are closed. There will be no words. Her chin rests on her left hand, raised to support her head and hold her sadness. Her fingers fall away, long and elegant and strong, clutching beyond her robe at something not there. Below this, her left arm emerges from her robe, this hand raised to her chest, cupped and positioned to cradle something else absent. An infant? A child? She cradles a child who is not there.
I was crying. I had no words. I felt the immediate, overpowering experience of a grieving mother. My body felt heavy and dull, filled with pregnant possibility and also barren, emptied. I felt I might fall to the floor. What was happening to me? A memory, deeply alive but deeply suppressed, forgotten, of a fifth-month miscarriage that I’d suffered during my first pregnancy 30 years before. I had been pregnant long enough to feel the baby move, to make plans, to know I carried new life, but too soon for that new life to be born, too heavy to carry. No signs of a heartbeat: my baby slipped into the world with no pain, no warning.
That was a time when such things were hushed over as tragic but only temporarily hurtful. I was told, “You’ll have another one. Don’t spend too much time thinking about it.” As though the child, the loss, the whole experience was not real, as though it would leave no mark, no imprint.
But seeing Mary here I knew that she understood, an understanding that was immediate and complete, without words but fully embodied. This was the embracing fullness of physically holding a child to your heart, feeling the heft, weight, and warmth of a child but, terribly and unbelievably, a child who does not breathe or move, a child who does not exist.
At the time, I knew nothing about the theology or veneration of icons. I learned all about that when I studied Eastern Christianity in seminary. It was a Protestant seminary, but this professor was an Orthodox priest whose wife was an iconographer. It was wonderful to learn about the Eastern Church. It was wonderful to read about and it was wonderful to be welcomed into a church community that recognized, encouraged, and made room for such beauty, such encounters.
I learned that the 14th-century icon that I had encountered was one side of a dyptich from the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Meteora, Greece. The other part of the dyptich is Christ after the Crucifixion, drained of all color, shown from his waist up, arms close to his side, his head tilted towards his mother. We see mother and child paired in grief and profound love.
It is venerated especially on Good Friday with hymns and prayers that tell the story of the Crucifixion and Mary’s grief at the foot of the Cross and at the Entombment. “Do not lament me, o Mother, seeing me in the tomb,” we sing Christ’s words during the evening service, the voice of her dead son. But here, on this day, in this space, she was alone.
Looking back on the experience of meeting this icon, feeling the presence of Mary as I did, I see it as a gift and a sign that guided me in my discernment process and led me to Orthodoxy. It was a key to my understanding of Orthodox teachings and gave me my first experience of the majesty and mystery of the Orthodox faith.
Judith Scott is a founding board member of Axia Women.
