This is the Theotokos of Holy Tenderness Icon which hung in the cell of the very great and much loved Russian saint +Seraphim of Sarov. He was praying before this icon when he fell asleep in Christ in 1833.
Gk Chesterton said the following so beautifully and it pretty much shows that the puritans were bizarre fundamentalists in understanding Christianity,it’s only gotten worse these days
Chesterton writes...
“”When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a newborn child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a newborn child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a newborn child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother, you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows I as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.””
This is the Theotokos of Holy Tenderness Icon which hung in the cell of the very great and much loved Russian saint +Seraphim of Sarov. He was praying before this icon when he fell asleep in Christ in 1833.