Head full of sermons, mouth full of spiders.

Moscow Dispatch #2

In a souvenier market in Moscow last Saturday, a vendor chased me through the narrow passageways with an icon, dirty and weathered, burdened by countless prayers. Madonna and child were barely visible, rubbed into oblivion through whatever journey it took to get from a small church in the hinterlands of Russia to a loud market where sellers are convinced I'm Italian.

The gold patina was all but gone, too, and I can't help but think that it's somehow more appropriate that way.

I bought the prettier icon, perhaps betraying a distinctly American preference for novelty, appearances and ostentatious things. I don't pray to it, but the temptation does exist.

*

Mary looks better in red, too. I don't mean that it's more apropos to her complexion, or anything silly like that. Red just seems more appropriate - the colour of pentecost, the colour that proclaims the presence and indwelling of the spirit of God. That spirit inside Mary that made even more fantastic the collision between miracle and material that is conception.

*

Icons were everywhere at the market. Not all of them were Orthodox, but all of them were religious. Old Soviet propaganda posters bear Lenin's smooth and stern countenance. His eyes, containing the slightest hint of levity, are forward beholding the workers' paradise of the future, jaw set in obdurate optimism. Red is the colour of choice here too, but for different reasons.

*

I thought for a while about the man who chased me with that icon. What a familiar form of evangelism - a tract (flecked with gold, gilded with dirt) as kerygma, as a warning.

However, I'm sure he was definitely more interested in 300 of my rubles instead of the eternal security of my soul.