PRAYING WITH HOLY ICONS
To help guide people to God in prayer and worship
Sister Michelle and I attend St. Clement's, Seattle. The parish has an abundance of icons, as you can see in the picture above. Members gather each Sunday at Our Lady of Africa to say the Angelus. There are icons of Martin Luther King, Absalom Jones and the Old Testament Trinity around. And in the nave we have the twelve Anglo Catholic Icons. The article below comes from "The Angelus", the newsletter of St. Mary the Virgin, Time Square. The writer is Zach Roesemann. I want to thank Mr. Roesemann and Father Sammy Wood for giving us permission to share the article.
PRAYING WITH HOLY ICONS
In my first article about holy icons, I described the elements essential to understanding the nature of icons. They are made for only one purpose, which distinguishes them from other forms of Christian art: to help guide people to God in prayer and worship. They are deeply traditional, with roots going back to the origins of Christianity. They are an especially powerful way to illustrate the Incarnation. And the Church teaches that they are vehicles for the presence of the figure depicted: icons actually “partake of the nature of the original”—of Christ, or Mary, or any other holy person. Thus, they are worthy of veneration like other holy things in the church, such as the Cross or the Gospels.
That is why, when you see an icon, it offers you an invitation. Just as you can be in a relationship with another person, so too you can be in relationship with the holy figure in an icon. That person is truly present with you. And you can be present with them through prayer.
Here are some suggestions about how you might pray with an icon:
Just sit and look at it; let it focus your eyes and mind; pray with your eyes.
Sit in front of it with your eyes closed while you remain aware of its presence.
Look at it, then close your eyes and picture it in your mind.
Let your eyes move slowly around the icon, exploring it; get to know it.Focus on a detail or a secondary figure in the image.
You can also try one of these responses:
Talk to the presence in the icon.
Confess to the presence in the icon.
Venerate the presence in the icon.
Take comfort from the presence in the icon.
Don’t forget silence. Standing or sitting in silence, waiting on the Lord, listening—it’s prayer just to look attentively at an icon and let God speak to you. Remember, when we approach an icon we are approaching God. So a sense of awe is a good start.
Icons have a rich, traditional symbolic language. The more familiar you are with this language, the deeper you can let the image draw you into prayer. This process is very much like using lectio divina with a scriptural text. Consider the symbolism in the icon and let your mind work on it.
Meanwhile, let yourself be put off-balance by the strangeness of it. The off-kilter architecture, the unfamiliar perspective, and the pregnant symbolism in icons are meant to be illogical by the world’s standards and open us up to heavenly reality.
We live in an age of diminished attention spans. Through all forms of modern media, we have been socialized in a culture of organized distractions, flitting from one fleeting image to the next. Icons, by contrast, demand instead our sustained, concentrated attention—an openness to another who actively approaches us through the window of the icon. May we be present to greet them in our hearts.
Zachary Roesemann is a member of St. Mary's Times Square, NYC and a professional full-time iconographer. He works out of studio space in the Saint Mary’s Mission House. You can see Zachary’s work at www.sacredicons.net. Zach will be a Guest Artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in January.