Icons.
While I don't use Pinterest a lot, I admit that I have an "Icons and Inspiration" board. I have been adding things to it since I started preaching, about 10 years ago.
I am not normally a mystic. I don't normally sit still. I don't normally sit and contemplate things. But icons help me with all of these. Icons help me settle down and settle in for some time of prayerful thinking, possibly even prayer itself.
Similar to seeing a moving made about a book, the movie images forever paint a picture in your mind about the characters in the book. Who can think about Harry Potter without thinking of Daniel Radcliffe? But Radcliffe is just one image for the character.
Before seeing the movies, I'm not sure what my image was, but it wasn't the same as the movie characters. The same thing happens with icons. There are some beautiful historic icons that were written either with a historic style, like the traditional Greek and Russian icons. These icons are written from the perspective of the writer, similar to the casting of a movie.
But that's just one person's image, and sometimes those images don't work for me. Or at least they constrain my imaginings about the person, or the story. That's why I have this icon board.
(I apologize for the wonky placement of the pictures and words in this post. I haven't mastered the code to make them behave as I'd like, so they just appear in random places..)
These first three icons are images of Mary Magdalene. We don't know much about her but what we do know is largely framed by the producers of a male-dominated narrative. I don't know much about these three icons, but they're rich with imagery that would be interesting to learn about.
More interesting to me are the faces of Mary. She was a woman with an amazing back story, and fascinating access to Jesus. The stories I conjure in my mind about Mary are as varied as the images I see in these icons. Time contemplating will give me a richer understanding of Mary.
These other icons are of Mary, mother of Jesus, and I value them because they remind me that my Euro-centric image of Scripture is only one perspective, and given the ethnicity of people in the Middle East, it's likely grossly inaccurate.
Icons let me go beyond my rather myopic view of things, and then let me rest and pray, while looking at something tangible. The tangible pictures help ground my concrete way of thinking.
I grabbed all of these photos from Pinterest, and apologize for no attributions.
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