When enough time passes it begins to work on facts as shifts in tectonic plates do on rock and folds them in on themselves, melts them and allows them to cool into crystals, dissolves some fossils, and retains the impressions of others. Anything is possible and so everything is.

A man stood in front of a Vizier accused of something and the penalty was the loss of a hand. The blade came down singing (what steel was there that never sang for blood, was not eager for the cut) and he prayed aloud mercy mercy and then it is said as soon as the hand fell to the floor, perhaps landing on one of those carpets which we later decided were ours with a soft thud, the hand came back, there-not-there, there again. In another story he held his bleeding wrist and prayed through the night, and in the morning as the first light of dawn struck the wound the hand returned. Both stories are true; believe the first with your left eye and the second with your right.

Here we will pause and make a space for everything lost through violence and arbitrary decision which did not, could not come back.

But those were different times, and miracles were as common as death itself then. In any case history does not record the Vizier’s reaction. Perhaps in the confused aftermath of the miracle the man was able to walk backwards out of the court, and so one of the first things he did after was to commission a silver hand to be made which was affixed to an ikon of the mother of God, who came to be known after as Trojeručica, three-handed.

The ikon like every other one was a window into heaven, and unlike most others became known for its power to work wonders. She travelled the world as it was known to those people (laughably small by our standards, but oh, so big by theirs) and copies of her were made in every place she landed, as though she were diffracted through some divine lens, her gift of wonder-working not dispersed but widened.

Not all prayers are answered, ever, and in this the character of mercy seems as arbitrary as that of violence. Here let us have a moment for all those things we wept and begged for and did not receive.

A saint who was not yet a saint brought her to a monastery in the navel of the world as it was known to them in that time (so small! we would not say that now) on an island which forbade all female animals, even hens, and ewes. The island was and is perfumed by those herbs that grow best in thin rocky soil, when the wind changes the air is full of their scent and that of the sea that surrounds it. Stunned by her beauty, the silver riza that covered her, the monks elected her Abbot in perpetuity and she served in this capacity until recently. Or, there was a dispute over the election of an abbot and monks who kept a vigil at her side through the night clearly heard her say over three nights that she was to rule. Both are true, believe the first with your right ear, and the second with your left.

It is easier somehow to believe in the miracles of the past which happened to other people; I wonder what will they say of us, and of our time later.