We have got into the habit of being loose with language, careless of original usage, extravagant in our claims for words whose history we forget.

 Nowhere is that more true than in our casual labelling of an occasion or a person as being ‘iconic’.

 The icon as a Christian art form was common to the Church in both the East and West. With the Great Schism of 1054, the Christian West lost its attachment to the icon as an expression of faith, whilst the East continued to this day to respect and venerate the icon as a vital and valued representation of faith. Western art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance took a different path. That is another story. Let’s stay with the story of the icon of the East.

 It was not – and is not – regarded as decorative but is written to strict codes of structure and colour. In this sense it is not only a figurative memory but is a teaching form for those who behold it.

 It is not an image of realism in its portrayal of its story, rather an image of contemplation, inviting a still presence in front of its silence that is both reflective and receptive.

 The icon is about the way we see, both the image in front of us and the world about us. It asks us, almost demands of us, that we are changed by the experience, taken deeper into the core of our Christian faith.

 I would question whether much of the art we find in our churches meets the same high intentions.

A couple of years ago I visited a catholic book shop to purchase some cards for a Grandchild’s confirmation. Why is it that we offer people, young and old, religious art that is not only bad art but also bad theology, dripping with silver and gold lettering?  I wonder, just what is the appeal? What was the message of faith that these images offered to the recipient?  

It is too easy to be casual in representations of our faith. Images offered to young people often remain in to later years so our responsibility is to be honest and careful in our gift.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of the icon in the Western Church . Two remarkable men celebrated the iconography of the East with their interest and understanding of the icon, Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Nouwen’s slim volume Behold the Beauty of the Lord is a fine introduction to icons, not as church decoration but as indicators of faith, representations that teach.

For Thomas Merton the icon was a significant expression of his faith, his small chapel in the Hermitage at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky having a number of icons on the wall. A small card with an icon image was one of the few items listed by the US authorities when he was flown home from the Far East after his sudden accidental death in December 1968.

The experience recounted by Merton in his Journal Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander when he was on a visit to Louisville has since been quoted many, many times.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

That quotation appeared in, of all places, a recent copy of Sports Illustrated, an American Sports magazine, following the death of Muhammad Ali. In the centre of Louisville there is a square now named for Thomas Merton where a plaque incorporates Merton's famous comment about his experience at the corner of 4th & Walnut quoted above. A while back Walnut was renamed Muhammad Ali Boulevard .

So there we have a link between a man whose respect and love for Icons and his sudden experience in the city of his love for the whole of humanity meets with a citizen who, for many, is a modern example of the usage of icon, a boxer known in his early years as the Louisville Lip.

In our appreciation and understanding of icons may the Church of the East and the West come together in the contemplation of our common mystery of faith.

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