St Nicholas, St Nicholas

A couple of Sundays ago, on his feast day, we unveiled and blessed the icon of St Nicholas I've long wanted to install in the church. Why St Nicholas? There was a medieval chapel dedicated to him in an outlying part of the parish, so his presence reminds us that that area belongs to us, too; and he's the patron saint of children, who need someone special to pray for them. Appropriately the icon sits over the children's area, hence the floppy bunny just below it in this picture.

I picked the icon up on eBay some while ago, being sold for a pittance by an antique dealer in the north of England somewhere. From a distance it has the venerable look of battered antiquity, but I suspect it is nothing more than battered, and has been languishing in someone's garage or something. It definitely has not been painted in the 'approved manner', with layer after layer of gesso being applied to the wood before the image is put down, and has a mysterious hole towards the bottom which I have filled up with a badge bearing the idiosyncratic cross-symbol devised under one of my predecessors and which used to appear all over the church stationery at one time (I can never prevent myself thinking of it as the Nuremberg Rally Cross). I quite like all these inadequacies. A little while ago we went to an exhibition at Two Temple Place in London which included a variety of really antique icons, and they hadn't been done in the approved manner either, painted directly on whatever bit of wood the artist happened to have around. Our St Nicholas must have been made by an amateur having a go at producing a traditional image with some love and seriousness, even if they haven't followed the rules.

We blessed the icon and lit its lamp at the evening mass. St Nicholas appeared in the worship at the Family Service in the morning. St Nicholas, St Nicholas/You were a good and holy man we sang to the tune of O Tannenbaum, a delightfully awful little song with which I joined in with great enthusiasm, and Marion the curate preached without mentioning pickled boys at all, which was a great shame.

Last Sunday after an evening hymn practice I turned the lights off in church and went through to the hall for tea, taking delight in the varicoloured lamps glinting in the darkness, including the red one at St Nicholas. Candles make a church seem alive (and vanishingly rarely, despite what you might assume, make them burn down).

I came back in a few minutes later to say Evening Prayer, and after a while realised that the lamp at St Nicholas was out. This was strange as there should have been hours of the candle left. Closer investigation revealed that the entire red glass candle-holder had gone. I felt a crushing sense of disappointment until I realised it was at the bottom of the font, when disappointment changed to mere bewilderment.