Clementine has finally settled in with her cow’s hoof. We don’t get them for her much because no matter how much they try to sanitize them, when the dog starts gnawing on them they still smell like … well, if you consider that cows spend very little of their time walking on sidewalks you’ll be able to figure out what they smell like.

And I’ve settled in with a bottle of Blak, the redoubtable new Coke fusion of Coca-cola and coffee. I don’t get them much because they taste like … well, like Coca-Cola. And. Coffee. I’m not sure what marketing genius thought that the public was crying out for this. You’d think that they would’ve noticed that if anyone wanted something like that they would’ve been doing it all along.

So it’s even stranger to figure out why I drink them. When you lift the open bottle close to your nose, the aroma is like vanilla extract and cough syrup. If Greg comes by, he’s likely to take a sniff just to remind himself that it’s really that bad. The closest I can come to a logical reason for purchasing and consuming such a product is that if it wasn’t so weird-tasting, I’d drink it a lot faster, and then it wouldn’t be a good sipping drink. Ideally, any Sunday afternoon should include a pot of tea — which is your perfect sipping drink — but it’s nasty-hot outside, and even in my air-conditioned office the idea of hot tea seems misbegotten. So I’m just sitting after church with a smelly dog in the next room and a smelly drink in front of me thinking over things that may or may not be important.

Today is the festival that carries the lengthy name of The Placing of the Honorable Robe of the Most Holy Mother of God at Blachernae. I had noted the name in other years without investigating, but this morning I decided to look it up on the OCA site. (There isn’t a direct link to that listing, but if you go to the site — here – anytime today and click on the first listing under Today’s Feast on the top right, you’ll get a separate window for it.)

The back-story of how the Church found the Theotokos’ robe in the first place was interesting to me:

During the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Great (457-474), the brothers Galbius and Candidus, associates of the emperor, set out from Constantinople to Palestine to venerate the holy places. In a small settlement near Nazareth they stayed in the home of a certain old Jewish woman. In her house they noticed a room where many lamps were lit, incense burned, and sick people were gathered. When they asked her what the room contained, the pious woman did not want to give an answer for a long time. After persistent requests, she said that she had a very precious sacred item: the Robe of the Mother of God, which performed many miracles and healings. Before Her Dormition the Most Holy Virgin bequeathed one of her garments to a pious Jewish maiden, an ancestor of the old woman, instructing her to leave it to another virgin after her death. Thus, the Robe of the Mother of God was preserved in this family from generation to generation.

How a “pious Jewish maiden” could see such miracles connected with a Christian relic and never convert to Christianity is a bit of a puzzler to me, but the story offers no insight on that. Neither does it say whether she parted with the robe willingly or un-. But in any case, it was taken to Constantinople for examination — it was verified in part by virtue of being undecayed after so many centuries, and also of course by the evidence of the miracles it had performed — and then taken to a new church built to house it in Blachernae, where it was eventually joined by the Virgin’s outer robe and belt.

I get mixed feelings when I get to this part. On one hand, I’m still too much of a New World gal to quite put aside my skepticism or my lack of comfort with things like that. But on the other hand, living as an Orthodox convert in this century when a relic is likely to be a centimeter-long splinter of cloth or bone, there’s part of me that feels almost jealous. The entire robe, with the outer robe and the belt. Skepticism, yeah, but heck — I’d go on pilgrimage to see that. And it doesn’t matter that no one I know outside of the Church would understand why, or even that I wouldn’t be able to explain it to them. There’s just something about things like that that you can’t put into words.

So the next part of the story isn’t hard for me to believe at all. When Byzantine cities were under attack or under siege, the citizens would take the robe in procession around the city walls. In 860 when Constantinople was under a terrible siege from the Russian prince and hope seemed lost, the robe was moved from Blachernae to Hagia Sophia, and the citizens felt that the Theotokos thereby gave them a peaceful conclusion that was miraculous. And so, when they brought the robe back to its home church on July 2, they proclaimed a feast day to commemorate the event. And so here we are, nearly 1200 years later, singing:
Ever-Virgin Theotokos, protectress of mankind, you have given given your people a powerful legacy:
the robe and sash of your most honored body, which remained incorrupt throughout your seedless childbearing; for through you, time and nature are renewed!
Therefore we implore you, “Grant peace to your people and to our souls great mercy!”

These sorts of things are such windows back into time. When I read historic accounts — particularly anything before the 18th century — I’m always wondering why we can’t fill in more details about what people thought, what they lived for, what they believed in and disbelieved in. Not that I’ve got a great idea of how you could find that stuff out — one of the frustrations of history is that we only really know about what people did (and darned little of that) and what they wrote. But this feast carries a lot of context. The foundation of faith and tradition that explains why a hymn was composed to commemorate for all time the day a robe was taken from one church to another is difficult to comprehend. To arrive at the place where your heart and your head can understand the significance of these things is even harder. Perhaps that’s a little miracle in itself.

The historic miracle didn’t stop with the end of the siege. Prince Askold, who had ordered the siege, returned months later to sign a treaty and eventually converted in Orthodoxy. This early attempt to repel Russian paganism didn’t stick, and he was eventually martyred. But this precursor of the conversion of Russia no doubt had its impact as well.

Ripples. Little things can end up producing big effects, on a person, on a time, and occasionally on a nation.

But meanwhile, back in the mundane world, my somewhat questionable beverage is almost gone now, so it must be time to wind this up. Maybe now that the dog is asleep, I can get that hoof away from her. What was I thinking, giving her that thing? Phew!