Colloquy, Volume 14 #3

Cooperative Endeavor with the Spirit

I had thought of icons as akin to stained-glass windows: more ancient, formalized and mysterious, perhaps, but simply an Eastern visual aid to devotion and understanding, equivalent to those glass pictures with which we Western Christians are so familiar. But my ideas changed when I took part in an intense icon writing retreat at the Anglican Monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The spiritual impact that came from those days was truly staggering.

It was as if a deep spiritual presence within the icon writing process called up and echoed realities of the Spirit already hidden within me, waiting to be stirred into new life. I recalled Psalm 42, One deep calls to another. To one accustomed only to Western spirituality, it was strangely mystical.

It began when I started to etch the lines of the design into the surface of the icon board with a sharp-pointed metal stylus. What had been up to that moment only beloved words from Scripture suddenly became an experience.

I knew first hand that I was carved into the hand of God. At an almost frighteningly profound level, I participated in a beautifully intimate image from the Book of Revelation. We are told there that when the faithful finally stand in the Presence of God, each will be handed a little white stone on which is carved the pet "nickname" by which God has known us since even before we were born. These were no longer familiar verbal texts and metaphors. I had entered into the mystery of their truth. It wasn't that I understood those images any better. It was that I now seemed, somehow, to have participated in them.

The next step was to paint a thin coating of red clay around the edge of the board and over the space that would eventually be the halo representing the divine life and spirit. The name Adam in the Genesis creation story is a form of the Hebrew word for red clay. The red clay of our humanity. The stuff of the earth and of our earthly nature.

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Then, with deep breaths, we emptied our lungs closely onto the surface of the space filled with dull red clay, moistening it, preparing it. Onto the breath-moistened clay we placed 23-carat gold leaf, as thin as a human hair. When we lifted the protective backing from the gold it clung to the clay, transforming it, for the one who applied it, suddenly and stunningly into something more than mere symbol.

This moment, a moment that will clearly live long with me, is perhaps the most difficult part of the experience to convey. The spiritual effect of breathing "life" into that space on an icon's surface reduced me, and others, to tears of awe. Somehow I had encountered the One who calls each of us from the red clay of the earth to the potential of transformation into the divine image. I began to realize why the theology of Orthodox iconography is based on the Transfiguration of our Lord. It is a process of transformation not only of a painted image but also of the person who makes it, or uses it in prayer.

In applying the paint, each area is covered with dark tones to begin and successive applications of lighter colour are added, in some areas as many as eight layers. The movement is always from dark to light. There is a deepening sense that you are involved in an ongoing participation in the creative activity of the Holy Spirit. You are brooding over the chaos and continuing to bring design out of it, to bring light out of darkness.

This sense is heightened by the way in which the colours are applied. The brush does not touch the surface of the icon. The paint (which is ground up earth material) is very watery. As the iconographer, you "float" the colours onto the icon. With your brush you move only the surface of the water over the space you wish to colour into life. The "face of the water" settles, the water recedes by evaporation and the earth-based colours appear.

The verbal scriptural imagery we read in Genesis becomes an inner spiritual encounter and reality. It felt as if I was involved in a cooperative endeavor with the Creator Spirit, brooding and moving over the face of the deep. As a commentary on the Seventh Ecumenical Council says, "Liturgic art is not only our offering to God, but also God's descent into our midst, one of the forms in which is accomplished the meeting of God with man, of grace with nature, eternity with time."