True Orthodoxy

A meditation for the Sunday of Orthodoxy

“In the course of my own winding, pilgrim’s, road to Orthodoxy it was the tangible sense of beauty that served as a constant allure. It was the radiant kindness of a few luminous souls, several of them bishops and priests, that made flesh for me what I had been searching for, not so much the zealotry that many were eager to offer me as their witness to the truth. Years later I came across a saying of St Symeon the New Theologian to the effect that a candle can only be lit from the flame of another living candle, and it struck me as exactly apposite.

When Truth is a living person, we can no longer try to make it synonymous with mere accuracy. What is at stake is more a question of authenticity. Orthodoxy is often approached by those outside it as a system of doctrines. But it is far more than this, and this is why a book of systematic theology does not quite capture reality. Orthodoxy is the living mystery of Christ’s presence in the world: a resurrectional power of life. It cannot be understood, except by being fully lived out; just as Christ himself cannot be pinned down, alaysed, digested, or dismissed, by the clever of this world, whom he seems often to baffle deliberately. His message is alive in the world today as much as when he first preached it.

The Orthodox Church is, essentially, his community of disciples trying to grow into his image and likeness, by their mystical assimilation to the Master who abides among them.”

(Fr. John A. McGuckin, The Orthodox Church, p. XI)

A Brief History of Icons

“Compared to metal and mosaic icons, the painted wooden icon is perhaps the longest lived subcategory of the Byzantine artistic medium of portable devotional icons. The earliest collection of wooden painted icons is found at St. Catherine Monastery in Sinai: some twenty-seven pieces dated to the sixth through seventh centuries. They are all painted in encaustic (pigment and wax) and tempera (pigment and egg yolk).

In terms of style, the portable icons follow the Late Antique commemorative portraits and imperial lavrata. Thematically, they employ scenes and figures from the Old and New Testaments. These icons were introduced into church as votive donations and remained in use for extra liturgical or individual devotional purposes.

During the tenth and eleventh centuries, when art was well linked to a more standardized liturgy, the portable icons begin to reflect the new trend by depicting various subjects of liturgical feasts. The liturgical appropriation of the portable icons may be detected in their moving from being stored in the aisles unto the emerging templon (the screen separating the altar from the nave) and the proskynetarion (the icon stand in front of the templon). The eleventh through twelfth century portable icons are characterized by a high degree of creativity within the liturgical framework. The climactic point for the proliferation of portable icons occurred in the fourteenth century during the Palaeologan period. This is the time when the templon becomes the high iconostasis found in most Eastern Orthodox Churches today.

(Eugen J. Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, pp. 282-283)

Sunday of Orthodoxy: The Doctrinal Significance of Icons

The first Sunday in Great Lent also commemorates the acceptance by the Church of icons as theologically essential for proclaiming the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  There was a very long dispute about the use of icons that lasted more than a century, but eventually the Church declared icons were Orthodox and should be in churches and venerated by the faithful.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writes:

“The doctrinal significance of icons. Here we come to the real heart of the Iconoclast  [those who rejected the use of icons] dispute. Granted that icons are not idols; granted that they are useful for instruction; but are they not only permissible but necessary? Is it essential to have icons? The Iconodules [those who accepted icons as Orthodox] held that it is, because icons safeguard a full and proper doctrine of the Incarnation. Iconoclasts and Iconodules agreed that God cannot be represented in His eternal nature: ‘no one has seen God at any time’ (John i, 18). But, the Iconodules continued, the Incarnation has made a representational religious art possible: God can be depicted because He became human and took flesh. Material images, argued John of Damascus, can be made of Him who took a material body:

Of old God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was not depicted at all. But now that God has appeared in the flesh and lived among humans, I make an image of the God who can be seen. I do not worship matter but I worship the Creator of matter, who for my sake became material and deigned to dwell in matter, who for my sake effected my salvation. I will not cease from worshiping the matter through which my salvation has been effected.

The Iconoclasts, by repudiating all representations of God, failed to take full account of the Incarnation. They fell, as so many puritans have done, into a kind of dualism. Regarding matter as a defilement, they wanted a religion freed from all contact with what is material; for they thought that what is spiritual must be non-material. But this is to betray the Incarnation, by allowing no place to Christ’s humanity to His body; it is to forget that our body as well as our soul must be saved and transfigured. The Iconoclast controversy is thus closely linked to the disputes about Christ’s person. It was not merely a controversy about religious art, but about the Incarnation, about human salvation, about the salvation of the entire material cosmos.”  (The Orthodox Church, pp. 31-32)  

Icons and the Seeds Between Them

In any Orthodox Church, we are surrounded by icons of the saints.  These saints are described in Christ’s parable of the sower as the “good soil” on which when the seed, the Word of God, “grew, it produced a hundredfold.”    As Jesus teaches, the saints “are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.”

Here is the full Gospel parable as Jesus taught it in Luke 8:5-15:

 “A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew, it produced a hundredfold.” A s he said this, he called out, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Then his disciples asked him what this parable meant.  He said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand.’ 

“Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away. As for what fell among the thorns, these are the ones who hear; but as they go on their way, they are choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life, and their fruit does not mature. But as for that in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance.

So, if the saints are the ones upon whom the Word of God comes and they bear fruit from that Word, where does that leave us who are in the church between the icons?  Are we simply the paths in this garden which are trampled upon and because of our hardness, the seed can’t take root but is taken from us?  Or are we the rocky soil or the weed infested ground?

NO!

We are what St. Paul says in today’s Epistle:  We are “the temple of the living God.”  God lives in us and walks with us, not upon us.  We are made of the same soil as the saints and are to produce the same good fruits.  The saints are not made up of some substance different from us – they are taken from the same earth out of which we all are taken.  We all are to be saints, we all are icons of God.

In Genesis 1:26-27, God says,  “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. . . So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” 

The word “image” is the word “icon” in Greek.  We each and all are made as icons of God.  God is the first iconographer.  God made us each to be a living icon of Him!

Our task is to live so that we are icons of God, visible to any who want to see.  We are to be living icons of God.  The icons on our church walls are not meant to be lifeless caricatures of legendary heroes.  They are real people, like you and I who lived the Gospel life and who continue to remain alive in Christ.

We are not meant to be the fruitless soil between the icons on the wall but we are to be the Church, the Body of Christ.  We are each to become icons showing the light of Christ in our lives.  We are to live so that God’s Word can interact with us and bear fruit for God.  We are to live so that we understand icons of saints are real people,  they are us and we are to be them.

“What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will dwell in them and walk among them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” Therefore “Come out from among them and be separate,” says the Lord. “Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the LORD Almighty.” Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.”  (2 Cor. 6:16-7:1)

Icon Exhibit Opens

Icon Exhibit

“Mary and the Saints”

St. Paul Church, 4451 Wagner Rd, Dayton, OH 45440
Friday, October 14th : 5-8 PM
Saturday, October 15th: 10 – 5 PM
Sunday, October 16th : Noon – 5 PM

Church Phone: 937-320-9977

email:  FrTed@StPDayton.org

This exhibition features more than 75 rare icons of the Virgin Mary and various other saints commemorated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Taken from private collections across the United States, the exhibition will include unique examples from 15th century Medieval Russia, 16th and 17th century Greece, through 19th century Imperial Russia as well as contemporary Icons painted in America. This is a singular opportunity to view prime examples of the spiritual art of the Eastern Orthodox Church as they were originally intended in their appropriate setting. Admission is free. Both self-guided and docent tours will be available.

“Zernov explains that icons (obraza in Russian) were, for the Russians, not merely paintings. They were dynamic manifestations of man’s spiritual power to redeem creation through beauty and art. The colors and lines of the obraza were not meant to imitate nature; the artists aimed at demonstrating that men, animals and plants, and the whole cosmos could be rescued from their present state of degradation and restored to their proper ‘Image.’ The obraza were pledges of the coming victory of a redeemed creation over the fallen one.… concrete example[s] of matter restored to its original harmony and beauty, and serving as a vehicle of the Spirit.”    (in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation,  Kindle Loc. 3120-26)

The exhibit is free and open to the public.

 

The Greek Street Food Truck will be present, selling their fare on Friday evening, October 14, from 5-9pm.

Icons: Visible Signs of Our Salvation

On the weekend of October 14-16, St. Paul Orthodox Church in Dayton, Ohio, is hosting an

Icon Exhibit, “Mary and the Saints.”

The Exhibit is free and open to the public.

As we contemplate the beauty and the mystery of icons and how they are ‘theology in lines and color’, we realize the nature of salvation:

“A sense of the holy in nature implies that everything that breathes praises God (Ps. 150:6); the entire world is a ‘burning bush of God’s energies,’ as Gregory Palamas claimed in the fourteenth century. When our heart is sensitive, then ‘our eyes are opened to discern the beauty of created things’ (Abba Isaac the Syrian, seventh century). Seeing clearly is precisely what icons teach us to do. The world of the icon offers new insights into reality. It reveals the eternal dimension in everything that we experience.   . . .   the icon restores; it reconciles. The icon reminds us of another way of living and offers a corrective to the culture that we have created, which gives value only to the here and now. The icon reveals the inner vision of all, the world as created and as intended by God. Very often, it is said, the first image attempted by an iconographer is that of the Transfiguration of Christ on Mt. Tabor.

This is precisely because the iconographer struggles to hold together this world and the next, to transfigure this world in light of the next. For, by disconnecting this world from heaven, we have in fact desacralized both. The icon articulates with theological conviction our faith in the heavenly kingdom. It does away with any objective distance between this world and the next, between material and spiritual, between body and soul, time and eternity, creation and divinity. The icon speaks in this world the language of the age to come. This is why the doctrine of the Divine Incarnation is at the very heart of iconography. For, in the icon of Jesus Christ, the uncreated God assumes a creaturely face, a beauty that is ‘exceeding’ (Ps. 44:2), a ‘beauty that can save the world’ (Fyodor Dostoevsky).”    (J Chryssavgis in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, Kindle Loc. 3420-34)

 

We will celebrate our salvation in exhibiting the icons which show our salvation, which make the incarnation visible to us throughout the ages.

This exhibition features more than 75 rare icons of the Virgin Mary and various other saints commemorated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Taken from private collections across the United States, the exhibition will include unique examples from 15th century Medieval Russia, 16th and 17th century Greece, through 19th century Imperial Russia as well as contemporary Icons painted in America. This is a singular opportunity to view prime examples of the spiritual art of the Eastern Orthodox Church as they were originally intended in their appropriate setting. Admission is free. Both self-guided and docent tours will be available.

St. Paul Church, 4451 Wagner Rd, Dayton, OH 45440
Friday, October 14th : 5-8 PM
Saturday, October 15th: 10 – 5 PM
Sunday, October 16th : 12 PM – 5 PM

Church Phone: 937-320-9977

The Greek Street Food Truck will be present, selling their fare on Friday evening from 5-9pm.

 

How Icons Show Salvation

On the weekend of October 14-16, St. Paul Orthodox Church in Dayton, OH, is hosting an Icon Exhibit, “Mary and the Saints.”  The Exhibit is free and open to the public.

Icons reflect the Orthodox theology of salvation.   In the face of criticism that the veneration of icons is idolatry, 8th Century Saint John Damascene,  offered a theological defense of the use of icons in worshiping God:

‘I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked my salvation, and I will not cease from reverencing matter, through which my salvation was worked . . .’”    (cited in Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology, Kindle Loc. 1880-83)

An icon affirms the truth of the incarnation of God in Christ, which is the salvation of the world.  The godly truth which Orthodox Christianity proclaims is that when God created the heavens and the earth, God created something distinctly “not-god”.  Creation is not the Creator.  Yet in the Gospel claim that the “Word became flesh” (John 1), the Bible lays out simply that in the most mysterious way, in the greatest miracle ever, God became that which is “not God.”   God became “not God” that “not God” might become God (to paraphrase the post-apostolic thought).  This greatest miracle ever became possible in and because of the Virgin Mary.  She became Theotokos which enabled the incarnation which makes salvation, theosis/ deification possible.

We will celebrate our salvation in exhibiting the icons which show our salvation, which make the incarnation visible to us throughout the ages.

This exhibition features more than 75 rare icons of the Virgin Mary and various other saints commemorated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Taken from private collections across the United States, the exhibition will include unique examples from 15th century Medieval Russia, 16th and 17th century Greece, through 19th century Imperial Russia as well as contemporary Icons painted in America. This is a singular opportunity to view prime examples of the spiritual art of the Eastern Orthodox Church as they were originally intended in their appropriate setting. Admission is free. Both self-guided and docent tours will be available.

St. Paul Church, 4451 Wagner Rd, Dayton, OH 45440
Friday, October 14th : 5-8 PM
Saturday, October 15th: 10 – 5 PM
Sunday, October 16th : 12 PM – 5 PM

Church Phone: 937-320-9977

The Greek Street Food Truck will be present, selling their fare on Friday evening from 5-9pm.

 

Icon Exhibit October 14-16

Title: Mary & The Saints: A Celebration  of Eastern Orthodox Iconography

Dates: October 14-16, 2016

Times:  Friday 14th : 5-8 PM (Opening Reception)

     Saturday, 15th: 10 – 5 PM

     Sunday, 16th : 12 PM – 5 PM

Place: St. Paul The Apostle Orthodox Christian Church, 4451 Wagner Rd, Dayton, OH 45440

Contact:  FrTed@StPDayton.org

Admission: Free. Both self-guided and docent tours will be available.

Description:  This exhibition features more than 75 rare icons of the Virgin Mary and various other saints commemorated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Taken from private collections across the United States,  the exhibition will include unique examples from 15th century Medieval Russia, 16th and 17th century Greece, through 19th century Imperial Russia, as well as contemporary Icons painted in America. This is a  singular opportunity to view prime examples of the spiritual  art of the Eastern Orthodox Church  as they were originally  intended in their appropriate setting.

Icons: To See the Mystery of God

“According to the Church’s hymnography, the first icon of the Lord was disclosed when He became incarnate, and the first iconographer was the Theotokos: ‘The uncircumscribed Word of the Father became circumscribed, taking flesh from you, O Theotokos; and He has restored the sullied image [that is, man] to its ancient glory, mingling it with the divine beauty. We therefore confess our salvation [through Christ’s Incarnation], depicting it in action [through the holy icons] and recounting it in words.’

The word of the Gospel and the ‘word’ of the holy icons help us to experience at first hand the mystery of the divine economy: ‘While our physical eyes are looking at an icon, our intellect and the spiritual eyes of our heart are focused on the mystery of the economy of the Incarnation.’

By means of the holy icons, we see the Lord and the saints. We converse with them: ‘The holy Apostles saw the Lord with their physical eyes; others saw the Apostles, and others again saw the holy martyrs. But I too yearn to see them with my soul and body and to have them as a medicine against every ill…Because I am a human being and have a body, I long to see and communicate with holy things in a physical manner too.’” (Hieromonk Gregorios, The Divine Litugy: A Commentary in the Light of the Fathers, pp 40-41)

Charity Icon Sale 2015

Christopher’s Restaurant & Catering, 2318 E. Dorothy Lane, Kettering, OH 45420, has for many years hosted a December Charity art sale.   All of the proceeds from the sale of the art on display in the Restaurant in December is donated by the restaurant to charity – this year it is being given to an Ohio prison ministry and to a women’s shelter.

The icons available this year were painted by an inmate in a state prison, Daryl, who converted to the Orthodox faith while in prison and took up iconography as a way to express his faith.

St. Ephrem the Syrian

Some of the icons have already sold, but some are still available for purchase.

Evangelist Luke

This year the icons feature various saints of the Orthodox Church.  Most of them are about 8″ x 11″ plus the frame.

Andrew the 1st Called Disciple

The above icon of St. Andrew is special to Daryl as that is his patron saint.

Evangelist John

Most come already framed, and the frame is included in the price of the icon.

St. Patrick of Ireland

For more information about any of the icons or to purchase one, contact Christopher’s owner, Chip Pritchard, at (937) 299-0089 or at chip@christophers.biz.

St. Brigid

You can see all of the icons he painted this year at  Daryl’s 2015 Icons.  If you are interested in commissioning Daryl to do an icon for you, contact FrTed@StPDayton.org.