The Wrestling with Angels exhibit presents icons of eight of the twelve major feasts of the Orthodox Church year, along with four other festal icons. Each festal icon has two aspects: historical and mystical. It is through the historical events that we perceive and understand the mystical events that, in turn, symbolically occur within us. Saint Maximus says, “And just as we know that a person who has been renewed becomes more sublime and godlike than himself, beaming with joy from his progress in virtue, so too must we believe that every sacred feast established for our sake becomes—in us and through us—more sublime than itself, because through our faithful celebration the mystery signified through the feast acquires its proper power to lead us to perfection.” *
For example, the feast of the Annunciation celebrates the historical event of a young virgin sitting on a stool spinning thread. An angel appears to tell her she is going to get pregnant. For some, simply seeing an angel might be the mystical event. For others, the fact that this announcement will lead to the incarnation of Christ and thus the salvation of the world is the mystical event. For the Orthodox Christian, while both of the above are true, the mystical action of the Annunciation occurs at the point in which the Virgin notices the will of God, understands its cost, then willingly yields—and this action repeats, mystically, in large or small incidents, in church or in everyday life, whenever we notice, understand, and yield to God. Through the practice of hearing the personal proclamation of the will of God and repeatedly choosing the same obedience that the Theotokos chose, we are changed into the sublime self we should become.
Traditional iconography sometimes refers to the Annunciation as the moment of doubt because the Bible says that Mary was “troubled.” Father Maximos Constas, in The Art of Seeing, has a moving interpretation, “This is the risk of unsealing the self, of consenting to have the chamber of the heart host another’s presence. The unsealing of love is a form of kenosis, an emptying of the self, a making of space within the womb of one’s being.... In the story of Mary, we have also come to know something of the human cost, both for her and for every soul that receives the Divine fire in the well of the heart.”