The frescoed head is all that remains of an anonymous “Ascetic,” whose image was reproduced on a card a Catholic friend once gave me, to help guide me on my way toward Orthodoxy.
The reproduction includes a portion of the wall on which, I suppose, this saintly man’s entire body once appeared. It’s easy to imagine that wall as part of an ancient monastic church, where faithful monks prayed and sang their love for God, before some hostile outside forces sacked the place and left intact only this austere yet strikingly beautiful face. The eyes stare beyond the observer into the abyss of eternity. They are sad eyes, which reflect the suffering of those who lived and died in that place, yet they are also filled with wisdom and a deep calm. They are the eyes of a genuine ascetic, whose gaze also penetrates into the recesses of one’s soul.
This sacred image illustrates better than most the truth that an authentic icon is more than a “window” that reveals the beauty of heaven within the limits of time and space. The icon is also a mirror. In it, we behold the face of Christ, His holy Mother and the saints. Yet there we also behold our own true face, the glorified “persona” whom we were created to become. Jesus Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (Col 1; Heb 1). He is also the visible image of ourselves, as we shall be when—one day by the sheer grace of God—we are transformed “from glory to glory” (2 Cor 3) into His own divine image.
In the meantime, icons serve to remind us of that sublime calling, that majestic possibility. Yet they also remind us of all that is lacking in our life, all that hinders our progress toward undying communion with the God who loves us. As mirrors, icons speak both promise and judgment.
I experienced this twofold revelation very acutely the first time I visited a saintly old Russian woman in Paris, sometime in the late 1960s. She had fled her native land during the Bolshevik revolution, and after a tortuous journey of several years duration, she ended up as an exile in a small apartment in the Bois de Boulogne, on the outskirts of the city. An icon of John the Forerunner, hanging in a corner of her dusty, book-filled study, brought home to me just how much these holy images indeed do serve both to promise and to judge. That evening, I tried to catch a little of that experience in a simple bit of verse, titled “Baba’s Room.”
In a dust-filled corner
Of her cluttered, musty room
An ancient icon hangs
Half hidden by a greasy veil
Of lampblack—the sacred soot
Of fervent veneration
That obscures the very image
The lampada would reveal.Dancing lightly on the oil
The flick’ring flame illumes
A face unearthly, wreathed
In an aureole of gold.
Gazing from the depths
Of the hollowed wooden frame
The Baptist’s bright sad eyes
Focus on eternity.In the stillness, gently broken
By her shuffle through the house,
My inner gaze is drawn, compelled
By those splendid tragic eyes
To fix upon eternity within
Where a once brighter image
Lies yet more obscured, concealed
Behind a darker veil of sin.Marked by long ascetic toil, that face
Describes with silent eloquence
The painful, blessed way to purity
Of heart…. The wild man of the desert
Is a staretz in disguise
Whose eyes perceive and quietly condemn
Mon âme de boue that happily confines
God’s image in obscurity.
The eyes of this anonymous Ascetic, like those of the Baptist, peer deep into the dark places of my soul. They perceive what I can barely admit to myself or even to my father-confessor: spiritual sins of pride, doubt, faithlessness and fear—all manner of foolish and hurtful things done “with knowledge or in ignorance,” together with endless other things left undone: gestures of charity and friendship, words of reconciliation and compassion.
Yet those eyes also direct my own gaze beyond the superficial, mundane affairs of every day, and enable me, like them, to focus on eternity.
Icons open a window, to reveal the beauty of heaven. At the same time, they mirror the divine image in which each of us was created. And thereby—despite our insufficiencies and occasional ugliness—they reveal the beauty that is in us as well.