I have a small statue at home of an unapproved vision. It is blessed by a priest. I recently found out that it is not approved. Now I want to remove the staute. The only thing is, what shall I do with it? If I leave it is a church, it might promote the non - approved vision.
Any advice would be good.
Thanks in advance.
From Vanessa
I also think you should keep it, but if you’ve done a lot of research and found out for sure that for whatever reason the statue isn’t Orthodox, and you don’t want to pass the erroneous devotion on,
One of your options is to sell it. When you sell a blessed object, the object loses its consecration. This is why people always have their houses blessed after they move in, and why you still need to get your devotionals blessed after buying them at the store.
Now, obviously you don’t want to let people continue using a bad statue, and selling it would just go against that. If it’s a particularly valuable and beautiful statue, you can sell or give it to a sculptor who can alter it to make it okay.
But if none of that is an option, (this sounds crude, but) you can break it and bury it. Breaking a blessed item would sever its consecrated state just as selling would. The custom is to then bury it in the ground, respectfully treating the remains of a formerly-blessed object.
Like what Rawb said, you can burn it (and once again, bury the remains), but I’m guessing that isn’t an option in this case, as statues are typically ceramic or plastic. You can’t light ceramic on fire, and burning plastic releases toxic fumes. Your statue might be wood, but even that poses problems. If it’s varnished or acrylic-painted wood, burning it might also be toxic. And even then, it’s pretty hard to set wooden household objects on fire. I tried it before by holding one of those long lighters against the wood for a long time. It wouldn’t catch on fire, and the best I could do was blacken the surface (I don’t know, but I think they intentionally choose wood types that don’t consume easily). You could use fuel, but of course that also poses dangers. Best not to do this indoors or even on grass, but maybe in the middle of a big slab of cement.
I still think that burning might not be the best option though. Burying the ashes will cause you a major headache. Burning the statue outdoors will definitely make some of the ashes get taken by the wind. And since you wouldn’t be able to put anything non-flammable underneath the statue while it burns, you’d need to sweep up the ashes, which would cause a great deal of scattering and even more interference from the wind.
But, I think you just want to really look into this hard. You may later discover that there wasn’t anything wrong with the statue, and later that you didn’t want to give it up, but by then it would be too late. Like, some years back, I bought a lot of these silver Orthodox rings from Estonia. Since I had so many, and I tended to have difficulties choosing which ones to wear, I just didn’t care about the excess rings. They were gradually lost or given away, and I think some were even stolen. Later on, I decided that having a lot of rings is good, because it gives me more freedom to choose whatever I wanted to wear. I felt like a complete idiot and I bought even more rings to compensate. Don’t be as stupid as me!
