My Own Device Dependency
When I was in college – before entering seminary, I used to have a lot of icons in my room. I would look for them on the internet and print them out – I’d go to the wax machines in the journalism office and wax them so I could put them up on my wall and I had a whole iconostasis there – like a little church almost. I used to burn incense a lot as well, and listen to some chant tapes. I had a lot of things there to remind me of my faith and make me feel comfortable at Whitman, which was not known for being sympathetic to conservative students.
During that time I hit some really low points and found that in many ways, the symbols of the faith were not helping me – they would create a sort of unusual attachment to hope – almost leading to a mechanical expectancy that because I had all of the implements of the faith in my possession, I would be kept safe from harm and would be assured success. Jesus was with me, right? He’s right there on the wall to remind me. And the theotokos, she was protecting me. She’s up there too… and the angels, and the fathers… everyone was with me, how could I fail?
Over time these things eroded as I found myself dealing with emotional and social turmoil beyond reason or comprehension. I found myself desperately crying out for these people to help me. Rather than approach God on an entirely spiritual level, what should have served as a reminder became a focal point of anger and frustration. It one point, I tore the icons down – all of them – and it was a fair representation of the limitations of the use of devices to establish and maintain a person’s sense of security. Over the next few months I lost my koumbouskini in the snow, and I even gave my chrismation cross to someone with the hope that it would protect her and keep her safe.
It was during this time that I began fervently searching the scriptures for wisdom that I couldn’t see on earth, and it was during this time that my heart awoke to the discipline of keeping the words of God close to my heart. More than symbols, these things changed the way I saw the world.
Eventually I went to seminary, and when I was there I didn’t really use icons or set up an icon station. In fact, the one thing I did have was a small ark of the covenant that I had purchased on eBay. Sure it was cute, but it reminded me of the one thing that really drove my entire seminary experience – “Fear God” – basically above all else. As I worked through my thesis later in life and began studying Jeremiah and the other major prophets, I think I really crossed over into a more intimate knowledge of the corpus of scripture. And I was reading about the New Covenant where it says that the Ark will disappear one day and no one will want to make another nor will they have need of it, presumably because of the high level of intimacy of access that the Lord would grant to His people.
It was at that point that I really understood the scriptural attitude towards symbols, layers of intimacy and our relationship with God. Overall, the best device or icon that we can turn to in order to keep God near to us is no device at all – to be raw to God. In other words, I needed to adjust my approach and seek His company face to face.
This, of course, comes full circle. As I found out reading through the defense of icons in the face of iconoclasm, I found that the justification for having and maintaining an icon of Christ was that through Christ’s incarnation, we are no longer denied the direct access required to relate with God. Through Jesus Christ’s incarnation, we were able to see God face to face – in the raw, anytime, anywhere – Christ is there and waiting.
Ironic isn’t it? The original defense of the icon was that the image of the face of Christ reminds us that we no longer need something to bridge the divide and encounter God face to face. The icon basically reminds us of the fact that we need no medium to receive wisdom and live according to the will of God. In its essence, then, the icon is aniconic – it points to a reality beyond what it expresses. It points to the possibility of a relationship beyond what it physically represents. You can face God in the same way that you can face an icon of Christ – only anywhere and at any time – and the incarnation of the divine Word of God in the whole of creation is what makes this all possible.
Likewise, every aspect of our liturgical life is designed to point to the greater possibility that exists… the ekklesia exists to point to the greater possibility of the greater ekklesia active in the entire cosmos. The departure of the Hebrews from the land of Egypt existed to point to the greater departure of our own souls from the world of sin and death and into new life. This is what an ‘icon’ is – it is an entryway to a greater truth.
And despite this powerful wonder, there are people who wish to nitpick over the aesthetic qualities of an icon. Just an extended example of how the pursuit of pleasure falls infinitely short.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
© 2006 Jacob Gorny