My First Veneration
“Now I lay me down to sleep…” she said. I repeated her words, each consonant round in my four-year-old mouth, my high-pitched whisper barely audible as I mirrored my grandmother. I remember feeling that each utterance had weight, like what she was teaching me was important even if I was unsure of the words meaning. For me, it was nap time, and this ritual was part of the routine. After we finished our prayer lesson, my grandmother tucked me into the bed and as my eyes slowly closed, I gazed around at the small haven where I rested.
As a child, I didn’t notice the small wooden icons throughout my grandmother’s home because so many other belongings enticed my young eyes: porcelain dolls sitting up piously, green glass canisters holding gummy candies, Grandma’s octagonal perfume basin with a faded orange spritzer, containing staunch smells of another era. It wasn’t until I was an adult who had become familiar with icons myself that I finally noticed my grandmother’s collection: small replicates of saints and martyrs, each with an array of dark colors and hard lines, placed on shelves and countertops standing at a mighty three inches. These were the heroes venerated by my grandmother’s faith: a Greek woman raised Orthodox, converted Episcopalian, who found solace in her beliefs.
I saw my first real icon in the village of Oia on the island of Santorini, Greece in an icon painters’ shop while wandering through town. After following the narrow steps down, I had to duck my head to enter the studio set up in one of the infamous cave houses, or yposkafos; a multi-room building created by digging into the steep hillside, structures synonymous with Santorini. Icon paintings, three to four feet tall, crowded the walls and floors, sitting on easels and resting against the legs of furniture. Yet despite the disarray, I found the eyes of the icons clear and penetrating. I was drawn to one icon in particular, an image of a female, cloaked in a cascading navy wrap, coral dangling earrings hanging, her head slightly turned to the right. Even with her face shifted at an angle away from the viewer, her eyes were striking; blue, bright, and steady. She wielded a sword, a departure from the usual demure symbols. Rather than grasping the sword by the handle, she held just underneath by the metal blade. The painting was done on an old plank of wood, chunks splintering apart at each end. The tag on the bottom noted it was sealed with an egg glaze. I thought of my grandmother, a feminine but steadfast and mighty warrior in her own right, and while I could not as an unemployed recent college graduate, afford the original, I bought her a printed copy as the next best thing. Even this flat reproduction offered more detail than her trinket icons and I was proud to bring a brave female face into Grandma’s home. Grandma had always been my spiritual guide. She taught me how to pray, kneeling next to the guest bed, our elbows pressing into the comforter, my four-year-old hands clasped firmly together. She always said grace and kissed her turquoise stone cross when she heard painful news. My sweet grandmother never insisted that I do, or say, or believe anything specific, except that angels were real and that she, and God, loved me.
*
Saint Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church is a local parish in my neighborhood. A Greek family invited me there for Holy Week services, and I attended on Maundy Thursday, a day of solemn reflection commemorating Jesus’s last supper. At the time, I was a teacher of world religions studying rituals from a variety of faith traditions and I gratefully attended as a guest alongside the family of three of my students: three Greek daughters to be exact, all with traditional Greek names, who danced the traditional Greek dances, and spoke with eagerness whenever they shared about their cultural and religious traditions.
The sanctuary was wide. A center aisle divided two sets of pews in the simple but distinctive room. Beams of colored light shined onto the floor through stained glass windows depicting a variety of saints and prophets in each pane. Jesus peered down from a mural on the ceiling. He had tan skin and wrinkles on his forehead expressing forgiveness with only the articulation of his brow. And of course, piercing eyes. Surrounded in blue, Jesus looked like he could descend from the ceiling at any moment.
Multiple priests flanked the front altar area, wearing long black robes covering their shoulders to their shoes. Each had a long coarse beard and took turns speaking and chanting while the people gathered. It seemed as if the service had already started, but the matriarch of the Greek family sauntered confidently to their regular pew, and I followed quietly behind. Once seated, I reviewed the program looking for cues about what would happen when but alas, I was lost. I sat and stood along with the crowd but without any rhythm I could discern, people joined the priests in recitation of prayers and responses in a confident united chorus. Since the only Greek I knew at the time was, “Se ago po, Papou,” or in English, “I love you, Grandpa,” I understood little, and observed intently.
Without warning my hosts stood up and proceeded to the side aisle, following several others. The matriarch gave me a look indicating I should follow. I popped up from the pew, discreetly wiping my perspiring palms on the side of my dress, surprised I was being asked to come forward.
I tried to relax my raised eyebrows and lower my shoulders back and down while standing up straight, exuding confidence so as not disrupt the sacredness of what was to come.
What are we heading toward? What will I need to do? Why had my Greek grandparents not taught me this when they were still alive? Would they be proud I was learning now or ashamed I did not already know?
We inched toward the altar. I caught glimpses of the exchanges happening ahead; a series of bows, a priest placing a wafter in a man’s mouth, lots of looking down. My host turned back toward me and whispered in my ear, “There is no wrong way to venerate an icon.” I reached the first station. The priest examined me, his brown eyes not unlike my own.
“I’m not…”
He nodded. I looked at the floor with a wave of relief, but still felt the rush of flushed cheeks. He placed his right hand on my left shoulder, closed his eyes and muttered Greek words toward the ground. When he stopped, we our eyes met and he nodded, sending me on to the next station.
The next priest ignored my eyes and did not offer the cup he held. I inched forward hoping our lack of interaction was in line with the protocol I was sensing.
The final station was next. I watched two people approach a painting resting on a stand: an icon of Jesus, cloaked in a maroon robe, holding a gold staff, sitting on a throne. The first person bowed to the painting, then kissed it. The next curtsied three times, then kissed the image, their movements natural and quick.
Do I pass this station since I am not Orthodox? Would passing be offensive?
Then my host’s words returned to me. “There is no wrong way to venerate an icon.”
Approaching the painting, I tucked my chin, squared my hips and planted my feet. Facing it head on, I focused on the eyes. I bent my knees, once, twice, as if offering a bow to the messiah, then leaned in. As my lips moved toward the icon, I imagined extending too far and knocking the entire thing over. At the image of me crashing into the icon, abruptly, I snapped back, my lips never reaching the paint. This was my first veneration.
*
A monk once taught me that the power and purpose of icons is in their eyes. The rest of the painting is intentionally nondescript, but the eyes are written with incredible detail as the focal point of the image. Icons are said to be written, not painted, because the Orthodox tradition teaches that the hand of the painter is guided by God, creating an expression of God’s will and less of an individual artistic expression. The same way stories teach that prophets like Muhammed or Moses received texts from God, so too an icon painter receives and transcribes iconic images. Icons are an attempt to embody the unseen. These images as well as other paintings, murals, and mosaics, use blue to represent divinity, communicating the presence of something invisible and holy. The eyes of an icon are designed to draw you in and give the viewer the feeling of being seen.
*
When I returned home from that first trip to Santorini, Grandma had the printed icon professionally framed and fussed about where to hang it in the home she shared with my grandfather. The living room would honor its importance, but it would not be seen with enough frequency, yet the TV room felt too casual. Eventually she settled on a wall in their bedroom, a watchful talisman while she slept.
Only later, when dementia sucked away most of Grandma’s recent memories, forcing my grandparents to leave their long-time home and releasing so many of the magical items I had wistfully gazed at during my childhood, did my grandmother begin asking about her icons and this one from Greece in particular.
“Where is my icone? I need my icone. Where did you move my icone?”
We chose a spot on the central wall in their new assisted living apartment, so the icon I brought from Greece would be visible to her from every corner and angle, from her bed, the table, and her recliner chair. But even with it in plain sight, in her last few years of life, we would hear her call out repeatedly,
“Where is my icone?”
Had I known how to venerate an icon when my grandmother was still alive, I would have taken the framed print down from the wall, sat with her as she held it in her hands, and looked on as she peacefully gazed into the all-seeing eyes. I would have waited until she offered the painting a simple kiss, so that as her memories vanished, and her mind slowly left her, she would have had the comfort of offering a veneration and feeling seen.
“Where is my icone?” she asked.
Bringing the icon to her, I would have replied, “Right here, Grandma. It’s right here.”
-Alexis Kent
Alexis Kent is a teacher, author, photographer, and speaker based in Mni Sóta Makoce (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Her work explores the intersections of spirituality, healing, family, and ritual uncovering the raw elements of what it means to be a human. Currently a graduate student in Indigenous Education at the University of British Columbia, Alexis is committed to decolonization and emancipatory change through storytelling, education, and Indigenous revitalization. When she isn’t teaching or studying, she is traveling, working in her garden, contemplating the awes and tragedies of the world, and eating the best food she can find. She is currently published in Open Thread Vortex and the International Journal of Mind, Brain, and Education. Her photography appears in Sunlight Press.