The Church At Worship
Greetings Fellow Iconographers:
This month we have an article contributed by The Reverend Peter M. Antoci, Ph.D, who shares his thoughts on Icons particularly in relation to his visit to Mt. Athos. Peter is an Episcopal priest, serving in the Diocese of Washington. A college and seminary professor, his areas of teaching and research are in comparative religion, biblical studies, hermeneutics, and spirituality. Having come late to icon writing, he has prayed with the benefit of icons since his youth.
Enjoy!
A Pilgrim’s Eye
There I stood, before the two great doors of the Katholikon, the monastic church at Vatopedi Monastery on Mount Athos. It was May 2023, and I was on pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain of Eastern Christianity. Standing before the threshold of the church, the first people I encountered were Mary the Mother of God and Christ Our Savior, one on the lefthand door and the other on the right. They welcome and bless you as you enter, offering the hospitality and refuge of God as you cross the lintel into a place of prayer. That threshold, that lintel, is both a symbolic, and a concrete, but liminal place. As a person who has prayed before icons my whole life (and come late to the practice of writing them), I am used to the notion of these windows into heaven. Athos is a mountainous peninsula, dotted with monasteries that are filled with these icon-windows, ancient, medieval, and contemporary. I was not, however, prepared to experience these icons as the doors, walls, and dome of heaven. The beauty of Athos can be found in its pristine natural ecology, as well as its pure iconographic environment. Everywhere you look, your eye alights on the Imago Dei. Of course, that has been the internal truth of Christian icons all along: they draw our hearts and minds to God through the creatures that bear his image.
Icons as Community
Esoteric as well as existential, spiritual as well as material, I carried my burdens through that doorway into a place of encounter. Of course I was not the only person doing so. There were the monks who lived there, and the pilgrims who journeyed there. We enveloped each other in our prayers, even as Christ and His Mother embraced us in this space. But there was a presence, or should I say presences, beyond us who were gathered. There were prayers being offered by others gathered here too. You see, to enter an Orthodox church is not only to enter a sacred space, but also to enter a liminal one – one that straddles two worlds, two realities: the earthly and the heavenly. However, this one space is peopled by those who have come together from both worlds. This is experienced visually by the icons that are written onto the walls of the building, which are not just frescos. In a very real sense, they are part of the architecture of the building. The walls themselves are made of prayer, because as is well known: the writing of an icon is preceded by prayer, completed in prayer, and venerated in prayer. This means that the Communion of Saints provides the structure, the built environment, of community worship itself. The walls that support the roof, as well as the prayers of the saints themselves, unceasingly join in the liturgy taking place here. Inside these walls, a liminal and eternal community emerges every time we praise God and pray for the life of the world.
Architecture As Holy Writ
My kind and knowledgeable guide, himself an Orthodox Christian, never referred to these images as iconography. He repeatedly used the term hagiography – holy writ, the calligraphy of sanctity itself, if you will. At first, I thought this was a mistranslation. Then I thought we were speaking about two different things. Ultimately, I came to realize icons of the saints are part of the architecture, and part of the congregation! Just as they once were physically present in church, they remain physically present through these icons. Just as the earthly community gathers in the church to praise God and intercede for the world, the heavenly community joins us in real time and real space to do the same. Each saint and each worshipper is honored with incense because they are all made in the image of God. Together their prayers and our prayers are the prayers of the saints. Over and over, like waves on a shore, the liturgy repeats this offering of incense and prayer to honor every image of God inside the church, both the ones on the walls and the ones inside the walls. The curtain between us and those who have gone before us is removed, and grace is shown in all of its incarnate beauty, unbound by time. This is neither just abstract theology nor liturgical tradition. It is the revelation of The Word, God’s Self, and it is written into the architecture of the building.
Unceasing Prayer
Icons place before us the saints whose lives have been
transformed through their participation in God’s grace.*
Among many other things, my pilgrimage to Athos made me keenly aware of two: the unceasing prayer of the Communion of Saints, and of the Community of Christians. Yet, upon reflection perhaps this communion/community is one reality: all those being transformed through participation in God’s grace. In November we are reminded about this Communion of the Transformed. On November 1st we call to mind saints who are well known, and saints who are perhaps known only to ourselves. Certainly, we can read about their lives in books. We can also read them in their icons. Both are hagiographic, which is to say holy writing. Whether they are books or icons, if you read from a faith perspective, you are engaging them in and through prayer. An iconographer’s process is preeminently prayerful, however you do it. Long before the creative process engages pigment and board, we read about and pray with the subject we are about to depict. The board, the pigments, the sketching, and finally the writing of the icon, are all done in conversation with the Holy Spirit, as well as the holy person who is our subject. When it is finished, tradition reminds us that we should be the first one to pray before the image, to praise God with the holy one whose eyes gaze back into our own: the image of God looking upon the image of God.
Thank you, Father Peter!
May God continue to bless the work of your hands, and May we rest assured of the value to God’s Kingdom of the Icons we create.
Until next month,
Christine Hales, Artist/Iconographer
LINKS For Christine Simoneau Hales 2026
- https://newchristianicions.com my main website
- Https://christinehalesicons.com Prints of my Icons
- https://online.iconwritingclasses.com my online pre-recorded icon writing classes
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK2WoRDiPivGtz2aw61FQXA My YouTube Channel
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChristineHalesFineArt or https://www.facebook.com/NewChristianIcons/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinehalesicons/?hl=en
- American Association of Iconographers: FB Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/371054416651983
- American Association of Iconographers Website: https://americanassociationoficonographers.com
- Individual help with Icon creation: Patreon. https://christinehalesfineart.com
