‘Stop looking and start seeing' was the advice of Thomas Merton to a young poet as they walked together through the woods, each with a camera. To look is to have some object in view and concentrate on that, while seeing means being open, ready to be surprised, startled. The present exhibition asks us to look—deeply—and to allow ourselves to be drawn into the transcendent reality the icons transmit. This gallery of icons is here at St Mary’s for a sufficient time to allow us to return time and again, so that we really enter into the riches that we have been given here. For an icon is much more that a work of art, a picture or a painting, however beautiful. An icon is made with prayer and asks from us the viewer a stance of prayer. As one of the early Church Fathers expressed it, ‘they contain a mystery and, like a sacrament, are vessels of divine energy and grace.’  

We can appreciate them the more if we look at the way in which they were painted—or ‘written’ as the Eastern Orthodox would say. They would always be painted on wood, ordinarily birch, pine or cypress—so icons painted on panels from wooden ammunition boxes offers a dramatic twist on tradition.  The wood is planed, and two slats placed at the back to prevent warping. A thin piece of tissue is placed over the surface, then covered with gesso to fix the natural colours. The colours themselves carried symbolic significance. Blue was the most transcendent and spiritual, green was associated with nature and harmony, purple denoted royalty, but above all, gold was thought to transmit the radiance of divinity. The process of writing the icon was sanctified by continuous prayer, and when it was finished the icon would be blessed. 

What does an icon reveal? In his short and most accessible book Ponder these Things. Praying with Icons of the Virgin, Rowan Williams speaks of the icon as being ‘theology in line and colour’.  This is particularly relevant in icons portraying the Madonna and Child.  In the type known as Eleousa, the Virgin of Tender Mercy, Mary holds the Christ child in a warm embrace, as he puts his arms around her neck. Mary’s eyes look both inward to her Son’s, the Saviour of the world, and outward to that world.  In the Hodegetria icon, Mary is ‘The One who Shows the Way'.  The child sits cradled on her lap, her left arm around him, her right hand pointing to him; the icon pivots around this gesture. But it is the movement of the eyes which speaks to us the longer we gaze at an icon.  Christ’s eyes take us to Mary’s face; Mary’s eyes are turned to us. She addresses us with those eyes, and she is telling us—her hand emphasising the message—that we should look towards her Son.  

Icons have played an important part in public worship and private prayer for Christians in both East and West for almost two thousand years.  Today we at St Mary’s have been given the opportunity to enter into that tradition. May we like the theologian Henri Nouwen—who when he needed comfort and consolation because prayer was difficult, or he was too tired to read the Bible, or too restless to have spiritual thoughts, would turn to icons—find in them the same experience of beauty, intimately connected with the experience of love.