![]() ![]() If Orthodox Christianity did not claim icons are essential for seeing the holy, I would not be motivated to try to inform non-Orthodox Christians about icons. If this were a book about icons simply as religious art, it would not be worth writing, let alone publishing. Icons are no less than the “dynamic manifestations of man’s spiritual power to redeem creation through beauty and art.” …icons provide a vehicle for our participation in God’s redemptive work. ![]() There was the longing to see God and live… However, I vividly remember saying at age seventeen that my reason for converting was, in part, because my previous church was just “so plain.” As with many other seekers, I had a hunger for something more tangible. I do not know if an increasing awareness of symbolism was due to natural maturation or to the richness of symbolic images so available in Episcopal liturgy. Symbolic images within worship began to inform my spirituality only when I chose the Episcopal Church as a teenager. My earliest spiritual formation focused on the hearing part and omitted what became apparent later as effective avenues for engaging the seeing part. ![]() “Both Jesus and Ezekiel recognized the parallel between having ears to hear and eyes to see, but in the Protestant tradition of my childhood, the emphasis was always on having ears to hear (the words of the Bible) to the loss of eyes to see. “Do you have eyes, andįail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear?” House, who have eyes to see but do not see, who have Mortal, you are living in the midst of a rebellious ![]()
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