Ponder These Things: Praying with Icons of the Virgin

What we call holy in the world – a person, a place, a set of words or pictures – is so because the completely foreign is brought together with the familiar and the everyday. No one embodies this more than Mary, who literally makes a home for the Creator of all things in her own body and in her own house – the strangest reality we can conceive.

 

            Ponder These Things invites readers to explore and reflect on the depths of meaning in three classic icons of the Virgin and her Child from the Eastern Christian tradition. Icons have been described as “theology in line and color” and, in tracing the movement within these icons, The Archbishop of Canterbury discovers the pattern of love that they reveal, a love that invites and embraces us so that we no longer remain as spectators, but find ourselves caught up in the drama that unfolds itself before us.

 

“Icons, says Archbishop Rowan, show us the way…. They help us to cross borders, to enter into a new and transfigured world. And that is exactly what I experienced as I read…. This is a book to be read not once only, but many times.”                  —Kallistos Ware, in the Foreword