While suffering the aftermath of hearing yesterday’s Gospel, I sat and stared at this icon and was comforted by the appearance of the disciples. In that Gospel, Jesus allowed the disciples to have a brief inkling of the blazing glory of a God who, by a mere Whisper of words, spoke our vast cosmos into existence. Those disciples, like the knife-bearing Abraham, seem in this icon to bear well the dizzying vantage of a medieval Sufi author, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi: ‘If you desire to know the true God, sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.’
