Icons are windows into heaven. That’s not poetry, it’s what they actually are.
When you walk into an Orthodox church, you’ll see them everywhere. Christ looking at you from the dome. The Theotokos holding her Son. Saints whose names you might not know yet. They’re painted in a style that probably looks strange if you’re used to the realistic Jesus pictures from your grandmother’s Baptist church or the statues at St. Anne’s down the road. The faces are solemn. The proportions seem off. Gold backgrounds instead of blue skies.
But icons aren’t trying to be photographs. They’re showing you what someone looks like when they’re transfigured by God’s grace, when they’ve become what we’re all supposed to become. They depict reality, but heavenly reality, the saints as they are now, alive in Christ, not as they looked walking around Galilee or third-century Rome.
Why Icons Exist at All
Here’s the thing: icons are only possible because of the Incarnation.
The Old Testament forbids graven images, and for good reason. You can’t depict God. He’s invisible, beyond all form. But then God did something that changed everything. He became man. The invisible became visible. St. Paul calls Christ “the icon of the invisible God” in Colossians. When God took on flesh, He made Himself depictable. To say we can’t paint Christ is actually to deny that He really became human, that He had an actual face you could’ve looked at and touched.
That’s why the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 AD condemned the iconoclasts who wanted to destroy icons. The bishops understood that rejecting icons meant rejecting the Incarnation itself. If Christ is fully God and fully man, then we can paint His human face. And when we do, we’re proclaiming that the Word truly became flesh.
What We’re Actually Doing
When you see an Orthodox Christian kiss an icon or light a candle in front of one, we’re not worshipping the wood and paint. We’re venerating the person depicted. The honor passes through the image to the prototype, as St. Basil the Great put it. It’s like when you kiss a photo of your spouse who’s working offshore for two weeks. You’re not kissing paper, you’re expressing love for the person in the photo.
We don’t pray to icons. We pray before them, in the presence of the saints they depict. The saints aren’t dead. They’re more alive than we are, standing before God’s throne. Icons make that reality visible in our churches and homes. They remind us that when we worship, we’re joining the whole company of heaven, angels, apostles, martyrs, your patron saint, my patron saint, all of them.
How They Work in Practice
Every Orthodox home has icons, usually in a prayer corner. You’ll light a candle, make the sign of the cross, and pray surrounded by these faces of people who’ve gone before us. It changes how prayer feels. You’re not alone talking to the ceiling. You’re in company.
In church, icons cover everything. The iconostasis, that icon-covered screen separating the nave from the altar, shows you Christ, the Theotokos, John the Baptist, the patron saint of the parish. Christ looks down from the dome as Pantocrator, the Almighty. The Theotokos is often in the apse behind the altar. The walls tell the story of salvation in images.
During services, we venerate icons. We approach, make the sign of the cross twice, kiss the icon, cross ourselves again. On feast days, we process around the church carrying icons. This isn’t superstition. It’s physical, embodied worship. We’re not Gnostics who think the material world is bad and only spiritual things matter. God became matter. Matter can be holy.
What Makes Them Different
Icons follow rules. The colors mean things, gold for divine light, blue for heaven, red for humanity or martyrdom. Christ’s halo always has the Greek letters for “I AM” because He’s the God who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. The saints’ proportions are elongated, their eyes large, because they’re seeing things we can’t see yet. The perspective is often reversed, like the building or throne is opening toward you rather than receding into the distance.
This isn’t primitive art or bad technique. It’s theology in color. The iconographer, and we don’t say “icon painter,” because writing an icon is a spiritual discipline involving prayer and fasting, is showing you the kingdom of God, not a snapshot of first-century Palestine.
St. Michael’s has icons throughout the church, and if you’re visiting for the first time, you can ask anyone to tell you who’s depicted. We’re happy to explain. Bring your kids up to venerate the icons with you. Let them kiss St. Michael’s icon by the door. They’ll learn the faith through these images long before they can read theology books. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
