Blog Posts
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.
The image struck me with full force as I sat one day at my desktop computer. I was staring at a copy of an icon from St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, Egypt. In vivid color, the Theotokos was holding Christ from within a mantle of glowing flames. Known as “The Virgin of the Burning Bush,” or “The Mother of God, Unburnt Bush,” this icon was my first introduction to theology about the Theotokos, while still a fairly new Anglican convert curious about church history.
Beauty is a difficult word to describe, particularly for women who have been sold versions of beauty for centuries but retain a deep intuitive knowledge that something much deeper is at work. During our Healing Beauty Day Retreat last week, Dr. Pia Chaudhari invited us into the nuance of beauty and its meaning in our lives as Orthodox women.
Beauty, she reminds us, is something we all recognize even if we find it difficult to put into words. It is something intrinsically delightful and full of unity. And it is a generative and life-creating experience.
A class of eager-eyed Bible college students confidently entered the nave of the Greek Orthodox cathedral. I lagged behind the group, looking at the religious paintings in the narthex, eyeing a pile of candles beside what looked like a small elevated sandbox. Some stubby, unlit candles stuck up out of the sand.
We were greeted by a man in a long black robe, sporting wire-rimmed glasses and a trim beard. He welcomed us to take a seat. The rows of pews and stained glass windows were not unusual in a Christian church. But where I would have expected an altar was an ornamental wall with a number of doors and an image of Christ on one side and Mary with the Christ child on the other.
As those of you know who follow us regularly, we run a series called Woman of the Week—and it stretches back five years, almost to the time of our founding. Someone nominates a woman that they admire, and I interview her about three things: how she got from where she started to where she is now, then some area of her expertise, and lastly about her morning routine. That lets our community hear about some amazing paths to being effective in the church, and it also gives us a chance to take a deep dive into an area we might not know about. The question about the morning routine is also key. The answer shows us that this person is deeply human—plus we may pick up some tips about how to improve our own mornings.