Though clouded in the mists of history like many ancient images, Christian tradition and piety traces the original icon to St. We are blessed today to welcome to our church this icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, and to stand before her to raise our prayers for the protection of unborn life and for the family. Metropolitan Seraphim instructs us that when we stand before the icon of the Redeemer or of the Mother of God, we are to stand as if before the Lord Jesus Himself or before the Theotokos herself, for there is a great difference between standing before Our Lord and Our Lady in their very presence, and picturing them in your imagination.” We don’t look at an icon as we do a piece of artwork, as beautiful as they are rather, as it were, the icon looks at us we enter into its gaze, for an icon is “a channel of Divine grace.” The icon is the place where Our Lord and His Mother, the angels and saints appear to us. When we kiss an icon, we kiss the one thus represented bowing before an icon, we bow before the one depicted thereon. In other words, when we stand before an icon in prayer, we are standing before the one portrayed in the icon. Basil the Great teaches that the honor and veneration we give to an icon passes to its prototype. HOMILY: Icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, 16 December 2013
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