As a protestant, earlier in my spiritual journey, I was uncomfortable with the idea of prying with icons, seeing them as ‘graven images’ to which I should not bow down.
However, fairly earlier on in my journey in prayer, after first praying with an icon, I realized that my prayer life was reduced by being deprived of the physical dimension of the spiritual life. Prayer had become mainly an activity of the head, and God was inviting me to use all my senses in prayer, including my eyes.
Jim Forest describes how many of our prayers have become too mental, like birds trying to fly with one wing. Icons can help us grow back the missing wing, the physical aspect of prayer.
Do you pray with your eyes closed? Because icons are physical objects, they serve as invitations to keep our eyes open when we pray. While prayer may often be, in Thomas Merton's words, "like a face-to-face meeting in the dark," cutting a major link with the physical world by closing your eyes is not a precondition of prayer.
Icons help solve a very simple problem: If I am to pray with open eyes, what should I be looking at? It doesn't have to be icons, but icons are a good and helpful choice. They serve as bridges to Christ, as links with the saints, as reminders of pivotal events in the history of salvation.
Finding icons can seem daunting if you don't know where to look. In fact, though you may not be aware of it, probably you will find them nearby. Just Google, or visit Pauline’s bookshop or maybe even your local Orthodox parish and you’ll find icon prints. You could even contact an iconographer in the event you want to buy or commission a hand-painted icon.
Once you begin praying with icons, you may find icons have a way of seeking you out. Maria Hamilton’s words resonate with me personal experience: "When an icon wants to be in your icon corner, it just comes to you. There is nothing you can do about it. I was given a small icon when I was chrismated [sacrament or mystery in the Eastern churches we know as confirmation]. Then I gave two away to people now and then, and every time I gave one away, two more came in its place. It is possible, with effort, to control the multiplication of books and recordings, but not icons. I never buy icons, because they just come to live here."
Maria also noted something a priest once said to her: "Do not go out and buy icons. Go downtown and look at Christ in the faces of the poor." For this very reason, during the Orthodox Liturgy it is not only icons that are censed by the deacon or priest but each person standing in the church. If we are indifferent to the image of God in other people, we won't find the image in icons. One thinks of the advice given to medieval pilgrims: "If you do not travel with Him whom you seek, you will not find Him when you reach your destination."
Once you have an icon, it requires a place. There may be an "icon corner" in the place you live; an area where one or several icons are placed that serves as a regular center of prayer. I have pictures of icons on my prayer book, and we also have various icons scattered around the various rooms in our home….
Some people like having a special place in their homes for their icons. Often people have where you pray they the start of the day / where they can see them before they go to sleep at night, but we like having them in our entrance hall too, reminding us to both go and arrive, carrying God with us...
If you don’t yet have an icon, some would suggest that you start with either an icon of the Savior or Mary holding Christ in her arms. You don’t have to have a hand-painted icon, you can easily get a print of a classic, well known icon. I’m very pragmatic and use anything that appeals to me, the test being: does it help me to pray? I’ve got stones, pieces of wood, various works of art (including physical icons, prints and pictures).
Keep in mind that an icon is a spiritualized prototype of the person represented. The icon exists to help connect you to God in prayer, for some, through the person depicted in the icon .
Icons can be placed in many areas of your home. If there is an icon near the table where meals are served, you may want to begin and end your meals by praying and facing the icon while reciting a prayer before or after the meal.
Depending on your place or places of work, an icon can be near you throughout the day — on your desk, over the sink . . . When traveling, you can (as I do) carry a small icon or an icon card (possibly protected by plastic) in your pocket or purse, or on / in your prayerbook.
During times of prayer, if not for longer periods, a vigil lamp or candle lit in your icon corner may help you pray. A flame is a metaphor for prayer. Its warm flame both encourages prayer and provides the ideal illumination.
I encourage you now to look at the icon, lightly, let yourself react to it, don’t repress of force a reaction, don’t judge your reaction, merely notice it, as you look at the icon, lightly….
Today's icon is called "The Virgin Hodegetria and Child", and is an iconographic depiction of the Theotokos (Virgin Mary) holding the Child Jesus at her side while pointing to Him as the source of salvation for humankind.
“Hodegetria” is Greek, meaning "She who shows the Way” – in the Western Church this type of icon is sometimes called Our Lady of the Way.
The most venerated icon of the “Hodegetria” type, regarded as the original, was displayed in the Monastery of the Panaghia Hodegetria in Constantinople, which was built specially to contain it. Unlike most later copies it showed the Theotokos standing full-length. It was said to have been brought back from the Holy Land by Eudocia, the Empress of Theodosius II (408–450), and to have been painted by Saint Luke, the author of Luke / Acts himself. The icon was double-sided, with a crucifixion on the other side, and was "perhaps the most prominent cult object in Byzantium".
The original icon has probably now been lost, although various traditions claim that it was carried to Russia or Italy. There are a great number of copies of the image, including many of the most venerated of Russian icons, which have themselves acquired their own status and tradition of copying.
There are a number of images showing the icon in its shrine and in the course of being displayed publicly, which happened every Tuesday, and the icon was one of the great sights of Constantinople for visitors. After the Fourth Crusade, from 1204 to 1261, it was moved to the Monastery of the Pantocrator.
There are a number of accounts of the weekly display, the two most detailed by Spaniards:
Every Tuesday twenty men come to the church of Maria Hodegetria; they wear long red linen garments, covering up their heads like stalking clothes ... there is a great procession and the men clad in red go one by one up to the icon; the one with whom the icon is pleased is able to take it up as if it weighed almost nothing. He places it on his shoulder and they go chanting out of the church to a great square, where the bearer of the icon walks with it from one side to the other, going fifty times around the square. When he sets it down then others take it up in turn.
Another account says the bearers staggered around the crowd, the icon seeming to lurch towards onlookers, who were then considered blessed by the Virgin. Clergy touched pieces of cotton-wool to the icon and handed them out to the crowd. A wall-painting in a church near Arta in Greece, shows a great crowd watching such a display, whilst a street-market for unconcerned locals continues in the foreground.
The icon disappeared during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.
If you would like to, I invite you (but there is no pressure on you to do this) to look at the icon again, but this time, with an attitude of prayer, ask God to speak to you through it, ask God to show you what God would have you see…
I invite you to resist the temptation to intellectualize the experience, I invite you to just lightly let God guide your thoughts and prayer...
Allow God to speak to you through what you see, allow God to use and guide your imagination, using images, thoughts, sounds, scents, emotions, memories and feelings, from your conscious or subconscious….
I now invite you to slowly come back to this room, this time….
I pray that this has been an interesting and enriching experience for you…
AMEN!
Rev Gavin Smith
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