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Like I’ve said before, this week dh and I are reading “Facing East” by Frederica Matthewes-Green, not to be confused with last week’s read, “At the Corner of East and Now”.

Last night’s chapter delved a bit into the use of icons, which I found helpful because it is THE biggest difference I’m grappling with. It occurred to me that I may not be the only one fairly clueless about the role icons play in Orthodox worship and why, and maybe a few excerpts from the book would be helpful.

The author tells a story about a book she read her children when they were small called “The Little Lost Lamb” that had pictures of Jesus with children in it. Her children spontaneously kissed the picture each night (they were Episcopalian at the time). She says,

“My problem, then, was not with using images of Jesus or depictions of Bible stories or heroes of the faith. I knew our love wasn’t being lavished on a laminated plaque but was being offered through the picture to the Lord himself. The image was like a window, a seen object opening us to things unseen.”

The idea of icons being windows (which is why they are always flat and not 3-D) is much of the Orthodox position. A quote from St. Basil the Great is, “Honor shown to the icon passes to the prototype it represents.”

It was upon reading this that I had two memories strike me that caused this to resonate with me: one, was that as a pre-teen girl I’d hide pictures of the boy I liked at the moment and sometimes kiss them; the other was the memory, fairly recent, of how I’d kiss our daughter Clara’s pictures. I knew I wasn’t kissing her (to my great pain); but that some secret hope within me existed that my kiss would somehow pass onto her where she was, and that somehow, she’d “feel” my kiss. Like a window to my baby.

In the eighth and ninth century there was a great debate over the use of icons and a group called the iconoclasts (icon smashers) destroyed icons believing them to be idols. On pro-icon argument reminded me of my little protest over R. C Sproul’s comparison of them to the golden calf.

“How can they be idols? They’re pictures of Jesus. If it was a picture of Baal, that would be an idol. But Jesus is God!”

She says, “But the Orthodox have no illusion that an icon is itself a god. They distinguish between worship, given only to God, and veneration, the honor that may be accorded an icon, a saint, or the Theotokos (Mary, God-bearer).”

And of course, what is often pointed to is the incarnation itself. Where God in the OT wanted no visible image, he then “took flesh and became a baby. He became visible, concrete, with shocking specificity: a man of certain height, build, and eye color, eating a roast fish on a Sunday afternoon. Because God chose to become visible, we can represent him; we can represent any person or event in his story because these are manifestations of God’s will to invade earthly life, to make himself concrete and visible.”

Which brings out the point that icons must be images of actual happenings and people; not conjectures and ideas of what we want to portray. For instance, an icon can show Jesus and the Holy Spirit as a Dove, but not the God the Father.

David fell asleep at that point and so we only got halfway through the chapter. This week Netflix is sending me the series by Sister Wendy and I’m hoping at least one of the discs delves into religious art and icons, both eastern and western. I’m still uncertain what to think; only that they’ve done it this way for a long, long, long time, while an image-less worship is much more fairly recent and I think, for that reason, some suspicion of that would be appropriate.

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