Armodoxy for today: Muiron’s Natural ingredients

The ingredients of Muiron are all natural. Forty days before the Blessing of the Holy Muiron the ingredients are placed in a large ceremonial cauldron before the Altar Table at Holy Etchmiadzin. With prayers recited by the priests and bishops, the olive oil, oil of balsam and the essence of different flowers are added and there they will stay absorbing the energy of Etchmiadzin and the prayers of the people, as we discussed in the last session with the example of the Curtain that continued to bless the homeless population on the streets.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of political repression in the Gulag prison system, and won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote this beautiful short prose poem dedicated to a duckling.

A little yellow duckling, flopping comically on its white belly in the wet grass and scarcely able to stand on its thin, feeble legs, runs in front of me and quacks: “Where’s my mommy? Where’s my family?”

… this one is lost Come on then, little thing, let me take you in my hand.

What keeps it alive? It weighs nothing; its little black eyes are like beads, its feet are like sparrows’ feet, the slightest squeeze and it would be no more. Yet it is warm with life. Its little beak is pale pink and slightly splayed, like a manicured fingernail. Its feet are already webbed, there is yellow among its feathers, and its downy wings are starting to protrude. Its personality already sets it apart …

And we men will soon be flying to Venus; if we a pooled our efforts, we could plough up the whole world in twenty minutes. Yet, with all our atomic might, we shall never-never! — be able to make this feeble speck of a yellow duckling in a test tube; even if we were given the feathers and bones, we could never put such a creature together.*

Like the life in our breath, the cells of a trees, the splash of an ocean wave or in the feather of the duckling Solzhenitsyn describes here, everything is of God. Here we understand the lifeforce that is essence of Holy Muiron, as the ingredients from nature enter the mix.

We pray, from the Book of Sirach,  From the beginning good things were created for the good, but for sinners good things and bad. The basic necessities of human life are water and fire and iron and salt and wheat flour and milk and honey, the blood of the grape and oil and clothing. All these are good for the godly, but for sinners they turn into evils.

*Excerpt from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Short Stories and Prose Poems. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971. Bantam 1972