(First Sunday of Lent: The Triumph of Orthodoxy • John 1:43–51)

 

It is Monday morning, and I can tell you with complete honesty: my prayer corner is becoming… a situation.

 

It started innocently. One icon. Simple. Serene. Very “I am a balanced person with a normal spiritual life.”

 

Then another icon appeared.

Then another.

 

Now I find myself doing the kind of rearranging usually reserved for:

 

1. hosting a dinner party,

2. seating chart diplomacy, and

3. trying to make sure St. John the Baptist is not accidentally blocked by the lamp.

There is also the small matter of me standing there with a tea towel in one hand and a candle stub in the other, trying to make the saints look “intentional,” like they didn’t just multiply while I wasn’t paying attention.

 

Yesterday—on the first Sunday of Lent—I carried an icon of St. Perpetua with me to church.

Not because I’m brave like Perpetua.

 

Because I need brave friends.

 

I tucked her icon between my wallet and my Christian Education three-ring binder (because old habits die hard). Paul drove, and I rode shotgun with St. Perpetua in my bag, whispering, “Okay. Stay with me. I’m trying”—my usual coping strategy: bring a martyr, bring a binder, try not to be dramatic.

 

I’m still new enough to Orthodoxy that I often feel like I’m learning a sacred choreography in real time—when to bow, when to cross, when to kiss the icon without catching my “Oregon, it’s freezing” beanie on fire, without tripping over my own reverence, or spiraling into the kind of overthinking that can turn “veneration” into “performance.”

 

On Wednesday at Presanctified I didn’t prostrate before the icon of Jesus (which feels like forgetting to wave back at your own mother). Friday, I marched back in—without my glasses—and prostrated heroically before an icon that was… not Jesus.

 

Humility, right on schedule.

 

This is my confession: part of me still wants to be good at holiness.

 

Not holy.

Good at it.

 

The first week of Lent has already been working on that part of me—the part that wants to succeed at repentance, the part that wants to grade myself, the part that wants to be loved while staying impressively in control.

 

We’ve been blessed—truly blessed—by the services, the stillness, the long prayers, the deep hymns that sound like they were written by people who know what it is to be human and hungry.

 

Presanctified Liturgies midweek turned ordinary hours into holy hours. Dinners afterward on Wednesday and Friday turned our tables into something like a warm parish hearth—steam rising from soup, folding chairs scraping, someone pressing bread into your hand like a small act of mercy.

 

The Church doesn’t only tell us to repent; she feeds us into it.

 

Yesterday’s feast has a surprising name: The Triumph of Orthodoxy.

 

If you’re new, or not Orthodox, or Orthodox-but-still-not-sure-what-this-is… the name can sound like we’re about to do a victory lap around the nave and spike a football in the narthex.

 

The triumph isn’t swagger.

 

It isn’t “we were right and you were wrong.”

 

The triumph is that Christ has not let His Church lose her way. The faith has been kept whole—not as a museum artifact, but as living truth. At the heart of yesterday’s celebration is one sturdy, luminous confession:

 

God became man.

 

Not as a metaphor. Not as a spiritual concept. Not as an idea we admire.

 

He took flesh. A real human body. A real human face. He ate and wept and walked and slept and bled.

 

St. Athanasius says it with the plainness of a hammer: God became man so that man might become god—not by nature, but by grace; not by ego, but by communion.

 

This is why icons matter.

 

An icon is not a replacement for God.
An icon is not a lucky charm.
An icon is not a museum piece, admired from a safe distance.

 

An icon is a witness.
A proclamation.
A visual Gospel.

 

And Scripture gives us the quiet center of it all: Christ is “the Image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1:15)

 

That’s the whole thing in one sentence.

 

Icons are the Church refusing to pretend that God stayed far away. Icons are the Church saying: He came close enough to have a face.

 

St. Basil the Great gives us a sentence I hold onto the way I hold onto my keys: the honor shown to the image passes to the prototype. Love offered toward the icon is meant to move through it—toward Christ, toward His Mother, toward His saints—like light through a window. Wood and paint are not “the point.”

 

Communion is.

 

Yesterday, I carried an icon and joined the procession—suddenly “Triumph” made sense: not chest-thumping, but belonging.

 

It felt like the household of God walking together—carrying faces we love, faces that have looked toward Christ longer than we have.

 

I could feel the line shifting and turning like one body. I could hear the shuffle of shoes and the muted clack of the censer against Father Stephen’s hand as he turned. I could smell the incense caught in winter coats and hair, that lingering sweetness that follows you home like a blessing you didn’t earn.

 

Wax had dripped somewhere onto someone’s hand. Somebody’s toddler made a break for it. Someone behind me cleared their throat, trying not to cry, and I thought: Yes. It’s Lent. The heart is thawing.

 

This is what the Church does: she gives us a way to be human in front of God.

 

The Gospel yesterday (John 1:43–51) leans in and say, simply: come and see.

 

Philip finds Nathanael and says, essentially, “We found Him.” Nathanael—unimpressed—responds like half the internet: Can anything good come from Nazareth?

 

No defensiveness. No performance. Only an invitation.

 

He says three words that could change a whole life:

 

“Come and see.”

 

This part matters to me more than I can explain, because I’ve lived a lot of my life like faith is something you solve—like God is a problem set.

 

The Church is kinder than that.

 

Come and see.
Come and stand.
Come and listen.

Yesterday, “come and see” sounded like choir voices rising and falling. It sounded like Father Stephen blessing. It sounded like bodies turning in unison toward the holy things. It sounded like the clack of the censer chain. It sounded like my own breath finally slowing down.

 

Then Jesus does something that is both tender and terrifying: He sees Nathanael all the way through.

 

“Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”

 

Christ sees him—before Nathanael says the right words. Before he becomes certain. Before he has the theology sorted. Before he has his spiritual habits cleaned up and color-coded.

 

That is the part that makes Lent possible.

 

Because if I’m telling the truth, part of me still wants to present a “better me” to God. A more composed me. Someone who has it together. Someone who isn’t needy. A “me” who prays like a saint and never checks her phone and always says the right thing.

 

Here is the raw truth underneath that: I want to be loved without being known.

 

Lent keeps uncovering something both humbling and relieving:

 

I am not becoming holy by impressing God.

I am becoming holy by being loved—and by consenting to that love, again and again, even when I’m a mess.

 

Then comes the line that pulls heaven uncomfortably close:

 

Jesus says, “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

 

Heaven opened.

 

Yesterday, heaven opened over wax and incense, over sore feet, over a choir that sounded like it had been praying for centuries.

 

Not someday when we finally stop being complicated.
Not after we achieve spiritual greatness.
Not after we master prayer.

 

Heaven opened—because Christ Himself is the opening. Christ is the bridge. Christ is the Ladder.

 

St. Gregory Palamas spent his life defending this mystery: the Christian life is not self-generated brightness. It is illumination—God giving Himself, God opening our eyes, God teaching the heart to see. Icons don’t decorate a wall; they train the soul in attention, reverence, and desire for God.

 

And suddenly my ridiculous little prayer corner makes sense.

 

Not as décor. Not as a “religious vibe.” Not as a spiritual scrapbook.

As a tiny Jacob’s ladder in the living room.

 

A place where my eyes are trained—slowly—to look toward Christ instead of toward my anxieties. A place where my heart practices saying, “Lord, have mercy,” and discovers that mercy isn’t a mood.

 

Mercy is a Person. Mercy is Christ meeting me in the real.

 

Fr. Alexander Schmemann loved to say that Christianity is not the rejection of the world, but its revelation—creation becoming what it was meant to be: transparent to God. Lent doesn’t remove us from ordinary life; it makes ordinary life honest.

 

It puts a little candle next to the mess and says, “Bring this too. Bring all of it.”

 

This is also why I carried St. Perpetua yesterday.

 

Perpetua doesn’t look like a motivational poster. She looks like someone who has seen Christ and cannot unsee Him.

 

And that is what I want, deep down beneath all my noise: not to be impressive, not to be “spiritual,” not to win at Lent. I want to see. I want to follow. I want to love Christ more than I love comfort.

 

If you are new, or curious, or unsure—if icons feel strange, or Lent feels intimidating—let this be the invitation that carries you into the week:

 

Come and see.

 

Come and see the Church carrying her icons not like a brag, but like family portraits.

Come and see the faith that insists salvation is not an idea, but a real God entering a real world.

Come and see heaven opened—not “in theory,” but in the middle of a Wednesday Presanctified, at a parish table over soup, or at a living-room prayer corner that keeps growing because love keeps making room.

 

Icons don’t flatter me. They tell the truth: my life is small, and God is still here.

 

And now, let St. John of Damascus have the final word—because he says what I’m trying to say with the clarity of a saint and the boldness of someone who knows the Gospel is not a metaphor:

 

“Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honouring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God.

 

How could God be born out of lifeless things? And if God's body is God by union, it is immutable. The nature of God remains the same as before, the flesh created in time is quickened by a logical and reasoning soul.

 

I honour all matter besides, and venerate it. Through it, filled as it were with a divine power and grace, my salvation has come. Was not the thrice happy and thrice blessed wood of the Cross matter? Was not the sacred and holy mountain of Calvary matter? What of the life-giving rock, the Holy Sepulchre, the source of our resurrection: was it not matter? Is not the most holy book of the Gospels matter? Is not the blessed table matter which gives us the Bread of Life? Are not the gold and silver matter, out of which crosses and altar-plate and chalices are made? And before all these things, is not the body and blood of our Lord matter?

 

Either do away with the veneration and worship due to all these things, or submit to the tradition of the Church in the worship of images, honouring God and His friends, and following in this the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

 

I came home, set my keys on the counter, and lit the candle anyway.

 

May Christ open heaven over your ordinary life this week—over your kitchen table, your car line, your inbox, your anxieties, your small brave prayers—and teach us all, little by little, to see.

 

Glory to God for all things!

 

 

Perpetua