So I went and saw.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t note a miracle during the service, unless it was that the choir sang almost continuously for 25 minutes and didn’t lose pitch. But then, as I said, I’m not always sure what I’m supposed to be looking for.

On the other hand, it is a beautiful icon, and I’m not usually partial to the Western style icons. I almost feel like the expectation of Something Happening keeps us sometimes from appreciating the profundity of what’s in front of us. The icon is quite large — 17″ x 36″ — and the case makes it seem even larger. It was mounted on an easel in the front of the church, and at the end of the service, the packed house lined up to venerate it and be anointed with oil from its presence light. The choir sang anything to the Theotokos we could find — even happily belting out “The Angel Cried” two times when we were told it was okay — and still the line was significant.

It wasn’t until I was in the line myself and getting close to the front that I could see why. As people venerated, they would stop in front of the icon and take a moment (or sometimes two) to offer their prayers as they looked right at the icon.

Ohhhh. What was it the one hymn said? “To your icon we Orthodox run when about to embark on a new enterprise or to set out on a journey by sea, land or air, offering you a prayer of thanksgiving and asking for your blessing and your help and our deliverance from tribulation and assault…”

And to those who are uncomfortable with something like this, Kontakion 8 may be helpful to hear:

Doubters and unbelievers are amazed to hear that streams of divine grace flow through your icon, while we know that this is so with this icon of Sitka and that God’s grace will abide with it forever. Therefore, standing reverently before it, we kiss it and venerate it as we would your very self; for the honor paid to icons passes to their prototype, and God’s grace acts through this icon in wonders and signs for those who run to you with faith and cry to God: Alleluia.

I was very glad that this was the way of it, because I did in fact have several petitions on my mind. So when my time came, I said my bit, venerated as I’ve been taught and then looked — oh my! — into the eyes of the icon. I’m so used to the Byzantine style. The gaze was so gentle, the face so young and the look seemed … I don’t know … full of what? Wonder? Sympathy? Joy? I couldn’t find any of the sorrow that the Byzantine icons have that reminds me of what I’ve heard of Theotokion icons — “she looks on those who crucify her son.”

I admit it. I’m enough of a thrill-seeker in my own way that I took a chair near the icon as others venerated. As I went home, I still could see that look bestowed on one after another, the rendering so subtle that it really seemed to me to change expressions. Sometimes sadness. Sometimes joy. Once — when a four-year-old bent slowwwwly from the waist to venerate and then turned and ran, arms pumping, to her mother in a pure ecstasy of a job well done — about to laugh.

I don’t know. It might have just been what I thought I saw. The lovely thing is that if I just imagined that, the miracle is still there. A 200+-year-old icon that survived hostile weather, hostile politics (Fr. Chad gave a fascinating talk about the conditions of the Orthodox missionaries in Alaska) and a church fire to be with many faithful. Father Chad also said that as he has made the tour with the Sitka icon, he has noticed that it has gotten lighter. Looking at other pictures of it, I think I saw that too.