I’m getting my chrismation icons blessed!

The third icon that will be blessed is that of St Mary of Egypt. It just so happens that the friend who gave this to me dropped in on us for a visit when our temple was studying Frederica Matthewes-Green’s Facing East during coffee hour. As we read her description of St Mary of Egypt as a ‘sexual athlete’ who became a desert saint (p. 54-5), our parish priest invited us for the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, a long penitential service during the Great Fast. He didn’t tell us much of what was involved, other than that we would be able to hear the full, unadulterated version of the story of St Mary of Egypt and that we should come completely unprepared for prayer because this is a service where our bodies would come to trick us into praying. And thus I arrived at the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete not really knowing what to expect, and before the service started, the priest said, ‘The expectation is that either before or after the words, “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me,” you make a prostration,’ which is a reverence where one bends from the waist until one’s hands touch the ground so that one can put one’s forehead to the ground, and then push back up into standing position. How do I know when to say that and make the prostration? I asked naïvely. ‘Oh, you will know soon enough,’ the reply came. It turned out that after every tropar (short hymn), we said those words and did a prostration. There were 250 tropars, and I was sore for five days. But the strange thing that happened to me as I was doing these prostrations is that after a while, they became automatic, and even when we were done, the reverences (the bows and the signs of the cross) came to me automatically whenever I was moved. As my body was undergoing this conversion, we read the story of St Mary of Egypt to break up the prostrating sessions, and as the hagiography described her levitating at one point in prayer while insisting that she is a sinner, it occurred to me that what was happening was that my body was learning to pray, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Thanks to my friend who understood even before I experienced the Great Canon that this is how my body would begin to learn how to prostrate, bow, and reverence, I am now having the icon of she who taught me how to pray again blessed for my icon corner.