When we come to contemplate or to pray before an icon, we seem to encounter an alien world. The image is curiously flat, the eyes impossibly large, the perspective the reverse of the way we see things. But what is depicted is the event or the person through the eyes of God rather than our own. We see Christ primarily, but also the saints, suffused with the divine light first revealed on the Mount of Transfiguration. We see in the icon of Christ the union of the human and the divine and in icons of Mary and the saints, transfigured and deified humanity, those who have realized their vocations as images of the living God.
The icon is not so much religious art as a proclamation of the Gospel in line and color and an invitation to relationship with the Lord and those who live in Him. And as we gaze at the icon or pray before it using something like the Jesus Prayer, our vision is purified and we find it a place of encounter in which the Lord and the saints look at us, piercing our souls and calling us towards the realization of our destiny, the sharing of the life of God. To pray before an icon is, as St. Gregory of Nyssa says, “to remember our future.”
Resources
Ponder These Things
by Rowan Williams
The Meaning of Icons
by Leonid Ouspensky & Vladimir Lossky
Praying with Icons
by Jim Forest
Douglas Brown is the Prior of Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York.
