Heavenly Treasures

St Gabriel of Georgia

St Gabriel of Georgia. Emanuel Burke. Encaustic on custom wood panel. Private Collection (Message if interested in commissioning similar icon).

Secondhand Shoppes

“Fr Gabriel”¹ is an old priest in Pennsylvania living alone in a large house with many empty rooms. Although he’s only been living there for the last twenty years, give or take, he’s been there long enough to know that his beloved faith is departing those lands along with the children of long dead steelmen and coalmen.

The old priest’s hands are constantly at work:

Fr Gabriel rotates between two or three churches, each parish being miles apart from the others, and with only fifteen to thirty on a given Sunday. While decent numbers for Orthodox parishes, the trouble is that they’re all so much older than Fr Gabriel that he, even in his old age, feels like a child.

The churches can’t pay Fr Gabriel enough for him to serve any of them full-time. This leaves Fr Gabriel spending the rest of his week tending his house, making incense, and salvaging holy things from secondhand shoppes and parishes closing their doors and the estates of reposed parishioners.

Fr Gabriel shuffled around his house as we spoke, showing me all his heavenly treasures. We came to a table overflowing with old icon prints. Several were sun damaged, but most were simply out of fashion with Orthodox Christians in America (e.g. Icons of the Holy Trinity featuring an image of the Father). Although I doubted any of these would find a home, Fr Gabriel couldn’t stand the fact that all these icons were around with no one to venerate them.²