...The icon represents a unique being, permeated by inner peace, illuminated by grace. In the icon there is a mysterious meeting of the one who prays, with the One to whom the prayer is addressed. It thus becomes a gate that transposes us into a spiritual world, a foretaste of what the righteous will experience in communion with God. May all those who, out of ignorance or bad faith, disturb the mysterious and symbolic atmosphere of the icon today, remember the endless line of good Christians who, for centuries, knew how to stick to the well-established ratio between comparison and reality, between the symbol and the concrete image that evokes by analogy, something other than what it is, for them the icon is a sign of contemplation, meeting and communion with God. Let the icon be, for all of us, a calling, and the approach to it and especially the understanding depend on our dowry and spiritual investment, the only ones that can lead us to deciphering its mystery, to the foretaste that it represents... Rev. Ioan Ioanicescu
