Icon Corner

One of the first things on my Lenten cleaning list this year was to get all our icon corners in each room set up. Well, we've had quite an eventful Great Lent so far (with many little temptations and a really sick little girl for a while!), and so I'm a little behind with my list. Some things I have done ahead of time, some things late. 

Today, my hubby finally had a free minute to hang up the icons in our bedroom. These are really special icons to us. The one in the middle is of Archangel Gabriel. We got married on his feast day (July 26), so my extremely thoughtful godmother/aunt and uncle gave us a hand-painted icon of Archangel Gabriel to remember to pray to him for our entire life together as a wedding gift. To the left and right of our icon of Archangel Gabriel hang our wedding icons. A Russian Orthodox wedding tradition is to have wedding icons - specifically, an icon of Jesus Christ for the husband, and an icon of the Mother of God for the wife. There are no specifications regarding the style of the icon or the specific icon of the Mother of God (there are so many different portrayals of her!)... Anyhow, in our case, we asked a friend iconographer of ours to paint us our wedding icons back before our wedding. He chose to paint us the image of the Three-Handed Mother of God because the original Three-Handed icon is located at a Serbian monastery on Mount Athos (Hilandar), so he thought that was nice for a Serbian household. (Of course, we had an icon of Jesus Christ too, for my husband).

To finish up about the wedding tradition - on your wedding day, you are blessed with your icon by your parents just before taking off to your wedding service (as a final blessing to get married). I LOVE THIS TRADITION! It always makes me tear up when I see this in real life (like for my sister's wedding) or when I look at this picture of this special moment on my own wedding day.

We have SO many icons in our collection, but I love having these three very special icons in our bedroom. They are a reminder of our wedding day every time I look at them, and they are a constant reminder to both of us that in marriage, you always need to put God and the Church first if you want to have a successful marriage.

I should mention that I have somewhere, deep down in a box, a beautiful icon cloth that my aunt/godmother gave to me (it is the one in the photo above, actually)...Once I find it (I am very slow at unpacking at the moment) I'll drape it along the icons or underneath them to make this space look even nicer (and to cover up the weird spacing in the right side).