The Common and the Holy: What Icons Teach Us About "Performance"

I recently accepted an invitation to publish an article with an upcoming issue of Liturgy Journal. I've titled my piece "The Common and the Holy: What Icons Teach Us About Performance." It  draws from my experiential research in iconography painting as well as my recent visit to St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Seattle, WA, where I witnessed the greeting of the miraculous myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon from Honolulu, HI (see the website devoted to this icon: http://www.orthodoxhawaii.org/icons.html). I will post information about the published journal when it comes out. Until then, here is a paragraph to give a taste of what my article entails:
"Ritual and liturgy, by using the material of the common and the everyday, stake a claim in the reality of the transcendent. The transcendent exceeds the everyday, while it simultaneously folds back into the everyday through the repeated traditions of worship. But at the same time, when liturgy focuses in on the unremarkable, such as the individual believer or the hundredth copy of the same icon, those objects or spaces blossom into the remarkable, the magical, or the religiously potent. That the Hawaiian Iveron icon is a copy of a copy is no mere accident—the miraculous status of a copy of a copy speaks theologically to the potential holiness of any object. Liturgical participation draws from this same paradox—every meal (the mundane) is a potential communion (relationship with the holy). The significance of the icon is that its mundane properties of wood, paint and gold, are made remarkable. Every ritual pays close attention to the potential potency of the particular. Ritual participation always is its own example, by virtue of its mundane particularity. By virtue of the multiplicity of difference that is daily life—each believer, each action, each flower, each icon—that which would seem to make us farther from each other, those particularities which makes us different, serve to bring us closer to one another. Through human performance, we experience the universal in each particular. To kiss the Iveron icon, Orthodox believers would confirm, is to actually kiss the holy."