Winter Light, by Lorette C. Luzajic

Adoration of the Shepherds, by Philippe de Champaigne (France) 1640s

Winter Light
  
Even Sunday, the city is a frenzy. All scowl and growl, eyes cast low. January’s slush and freeze fresh, slick and slippery. The banshee winds spooking shrill through skyrise corridors. Still, you are standing. Still here to count the day a blessing. This time last year, it was possible, likely even, that you would die.
 
Still fragile, you watch carefully for ice patches in the parking lot of St. Seraphim of Sarov Orthodox cathedral. The church is half empty but your heart is full of mystery as prayer fills the room. The Christmas trees and poinsettia remind you of the reason.  On every wall, icon paintings of saints and intricate vines, dusty pinks and rusty reds. Ancient symbols and acronyms like ciphers. A cloud of warm frankincense. The rites here are as indecipherable to you as the Cyrillic on vellum, an unfamiliar choreography.
 
It is the dancing light from bouquets of beeswax candles, slender stalks bundled at either side of the altar. It is magical how it flickers against the gold leaf of Mary’s halo:   Theotokos, and the elaborate inlaid gold framing the icons that are doors between the narthex and the nave.  There was a time when you were outraged by such ornaments, when some people went hungry. But today you think about the woman washing Christ’s feet with rare perfumes. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me.  Gold is a gift, like life, and beauty is profound and rare. A taste of heaven. In this space, it belongs to everyone. The whole city can step inside to pray and partake of it. This gift of life.
 
You do not know these traditions, how gold symbolizes purity, the unperishable, the precious, or that it reflects the eternal light, but you feel something about it in its glow. The lowly manger,  the splendor of glory, two different aspects of the same winter light.
 
The Divine Liturgy: men in white and gold cloaks and crosses, with candle sticks, dikirion and trikirion, glowing the unwaning light of God. Their ecstatic, mournful incantations meld with myrrh and balsam, rich and sweet as angels in the honeyed air.

Lorette C. Luzajic

This first appeared in Heart of Flesh.

Lorette C. Luzajic is a writer, editor, and visual artist in Toronto, Canada.