A Christmas Miracle

Peace in a Box® (detail), a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

A peculiar memory found me today and I wanted to write it down before it left again. In college I had a Serbian American friend who I first met at the local Orthodox Mission. I had only just become Orthodox and was enjoying making friends with students from Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East among other places. This Serbian American girl was shy, soft spoken, and of very few words. It was at least a few months before I figured out she spoke perfect English and had actually lived in American since she was a young child. She did not appear to be particularly pious and did not commune at our parish when she visited off and on the first several months. This perspective had more to do with my own misguided piety and knee jerk judgmentalism than the state of this sweet girl's soul.

As I got to know her better we became friends and I met some of her family members. Her parents spoke with a heavy accent and had grown up in Communist Yugoslavia before immigrating to the United States. My friend told me that growing up they would go to church on Pascha and on St. Sava's Day, that most famous and popular of Serbian saints, but not much else besides. My experience was so very different in that my father was a Protestant minister and we attended church up to three times a week every week for as far back as I could remember. She was very gracious in our conversations about faith which was in stark contrast to my own more obnoxious approach fueled by a convert's zeal. Over the course of time she began participating more fully in her Orthodox faith, probably in spite of my influence if I am to be painfully honest.

It was within this context that she shared with me a story her father told her when she was home over Christmas Break. He was aware of her burgeoning interest though he was not a very religiously minded person himself having grown up in a country where such things were actively discouraged. What he shared surprised her because it was not like anything he'd ever talked about before. The story was about something remarkable that had happened in their village in Serbia when he was a young man.

During the course of a cold and dreary winter day someone in that village noticed something peculiar about the frost that had formed on a window near the center of town. Upon closer inspection they were shocked to find the image of the Theotokos and Christ Child (as depicted in icons) distinctly formed in the ice crystals. Word spread quickly and a large crowd grew around the window. My friend's father pushed his way to the front to get a look for himself. It was something inexplicable but undeniable. It didn't take long for the local authorities to catch wind about what was happening but they did not know what to do about it at first, not wanting to get the villagers too upset. After just a few days too many people were coming to see and venerate this miraculous image and so they were forced to act. Soldiers came and broke the window.

My friend was taken aback by how matter-of-factly he told the story, a story he had never shared with her before. It was like the miracle had a second run in their home in the retelling, a shared moment between father and daughter.