DAVID CRUMM: ICONS OPEN NEW RELIGIOUS WORLDS
Free Press Columnist

Detroit Free Press, MI
Sept 9 2006

Free lectures to be given on Tuesday

This Madonna and child icon belongs to Bishop Nicholas Samra, a Melkite
Catholic clergyman who visited St. John Armenian Church recently.

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~U If you go

~U Tell us what you think In our culture where image is everything,
local Orthodox and Catholic leaders are planning to showcase some of
the most powerful images human hands can create.

They’re icons, and it’s no coincidence that this ancient term for
sacred images also describes the little pictures on our computer
screens. At first glance, icons are merely pictures, but both kinds
of icons really are doorways to the forces hovering behind them.

In computers, icons open software from e-mails to databases. In
churches, icons are "visible images that open up the invisible world,"
said the Rev. Garabed Kochakian, an iconographer and the pastor of
St. John Armenian Apostolic Church in Southfield.

"Icons are channels, like windows to God," added the Rev. Dimitrie
Vincent, pastor of St. Thomas Albanian Orthodox Church in Farmington
Hills. Like Kochakian, he is an artist as well as a priest.

The two were among nine religious leaders who met recently at St.
John to plan a joint icon showcase Tuesday at an Orthodox church
in Livonia.

"Icons really are symbols of what unites us as Christians," Vincent
said last week.

Catholics also are getting more interested in them, said Michael
Hovey, an ecumenical adviser to Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida. "In the
past year, I’ve visited at least 60 of our Catholic parishes and I’m
impressed at the growing number that have icons," Hovey said.

Dan McAfee, the director of Maida’s office for Christian worship,
said, "There was a time after our Second Vatican Council when people
were eager to clear out everything in our churches that might seem
extraneous. People removed lots of statues and paintings. But I think
people are realizing that, in some cases, we may have gone too far."

The growing fascination with these strangely flat-looking images of
saints and biblical scenes may seem puzzling. The rest of the world’s
media are racing in other directions, like sending clips of movies
to the tiny screens of cell phones.

Antiquity is part of the allure of icons. Traditional Christian
stories say that the gospel writer St. Luke also painted icons.

Centuries-old tales of miracles surround many of them. But icons are
much more than history lessons.

After the meeting, Kochakian took guests to see a large icon that
he designed for a wall of his church. It’s a mosaic made of colored
glass and gold leaf, showing St. Gregory the Illuminator, the first
head of the Armenian Church about 1,700 years ago.

As guests approached the mosaic, they saw a tall, bearded man in red
robes standing before a snow-capped mountain in Armenia, holding a
model of a church. Then, as guests moved closer, they could see a
drama unfolding in the background. A fist seemed to emerge from the
sky, wielding a flaming hammer.

"In Armenian tradition, that’s the hand of Christ emerging to strike
the ground with a golden hammer to mark the location of our first
cathedral," Kochakian said.

There was more: The saint’s eyes seemed to fix on viewers wherever
they stood, silently asking what each one thought of these images.

Such all-seeing eyes are the trademark of this sacred art, McAfee
said. "As you approach an icon, you find that, as much as you look
at the icon, the icon looks back out at you."

The icon of St. Gregory was merely an arrangement of colored glass
and yet the saint’s eyes seemed alive with the question: So, what do
you think of this spiritual world?

Then, suddenly it dawned on at least this visitor: Our contemporary
fascination with asking for each person’s viewpoint on the spiritual
world is really as ancient a practice as icons themselves.