Do you know anything about icons? Not the little technology-based dingbats you click on to, say, share a blog, but the kind that people of faith use for devotional purposes. They are used most often in the Greek and Eastern Orthodox traditions, but can be found in almost any spiritual practice: a time of meditation before a Buddha could also be considered a form of connection through a visual symbol.
We arrived at the workshop a few minutes late. There were nearly a hundred people seated on simple wooden benches and listening enrapt. Clustered around the room, people were translating the Brother’s comments (which, to my great relief, were in English) into German, French, Italian. A large icon was propped up on an easel at the front of the room. Like most icons, it was flat in appearance with a strong use of gold and featuring key biblical characters. The icons I was familiar with were typically of a single face, usually Christ, but sometimes Mary, or Mary holding her son. The idea of praying with icons is not unlike a woman in labor zeroing in on a focal point; by harnessing all your energy and concentration towards that one image, you can endeavor to transcend your earthly reality. For a Christian, the use of icons allows an opening in the spirit in which to commune with the Living God.
I knew all this before I came to Taize. What I didn’t know was that icons could also be depictions of whole narrative scenes with multiple characters. The one at the front of the room featured Christ in a white robe bending down as if to bid farewell as he slowly rose up above the crowd. It seemed to be a visual representation of the Ascension, an event that went unseen by human eyes.
“You see here there are twelve people surrounding Jesus,” the Brother said, and we all nodded, confident that they were the 12 disciples. Most of the apostles are not singled out in the icon tradition, he told us, but a few will have distinguishing marks. “This one here is Peter,” the disciple to whom he gave “the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16: 19) And this one here, the Brother continued, “Is Paul. He is usually easy to identify as he is the bald one with the beard and the reddish, brown robe.” Many around continued to nod and smile. I did not. A decade ago, I couldn’t have told you who Paul was, but in that moment the brakes in my brain skidded violently: Wait a minute! Paul wasn’t even on board at the time of the Ascension. He was still called Saul back then, the world’s greatest persecutor of the early followers of Christ, a man who wouldn’t see the light til years later during his fateful journey along the Road to Damascus. And although he went onto be one of the great evangelists in human history, writing letters of encouragement, guidance, discipline, teaching, and spiritual development to the early home churches— what I call the “ians” books of the Bible; Colossians, Corinthians, Thessalonians etc— he was never one of the twelve disciples. And what about Judas? And what about Matthias, the one who was chosen to replace Judas?
The Brother interrupted my internal monologue to comment on these very issues of “artistic license” and I smiled privately. Oh. Somehow, someway, by some miracle of faith, all those hours and moments and days where I had committed to reading scripture studiously, prayerfully, religiously, some of it— not just the spirit of it, but the facts of it— had actually started to stick. This, in that moment, felt like a revelation.
Heather Choate Davis 