Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Infant contemplation


A friend of mine brought his precocious two-ish year old to see me. On the wall opposite my sitting room is a 19th century icon of the Mother of God of Kazan.

Little James in between making threatening gestures to my seventeenth century missal with his fire engine, wanting to eat a Ming tomb figure and wanting to add a foreword to one of the Pope's books with a red crayon, he kept going up to stare at the icon at one time for over a minute. At home his prayer routine was basically a cuddle and "God bless...".
When I have recharged the battery in my camera I am going to make a large copy of the icon and send it to him.
I was so struck by the magnetic pull of the icon and this story by Paulinus and Fr Tim.
Compare and contast.

4 comments:

gemoftheocean said...

I think Our Lady may have been warning him re: the consequences of adding a forward to that particular volume. There are a few manuscripts, however that can use such embellishments...surely there must be an indelible black sharpie around for that.

[And you have a firetruck in your sitting room, how cool is that?! Who knew?]

Fr Ray Blake said...

Fire engine/truck was his.

gemoftheocean said...

Rats! ;-D If you're lucky he left it behind, and then you can play with it too!

Roses and Jessamine said...

Our Lord is on the dexter, and this reminds of the fact that the Eastern Orthodox make the sign of the cross with the hand moving to the right in the third position, whereas Catholics move to the left in third. The deeper meaning of the sign of the cross as a form of prayer interests me. To me, the right is about the greater - the giving; the left is about the lesser - the receiving. Also, the Orthodox use all three fingers to make the sign of the cross, whereas Catholics use two up one down, as Jesus is shown in the icon, blessing.

The Lord’s descent into the underworld

At Matins/the Office of Readings on Holy Saturday the Church gives us this 'ancient homily', I find it incredibly moving, it is abou...