In the earliest years of my Orthodox parish, we rented a “warehouse” space. Essentially, it was a store front with warehouse storage place in the rear. It was a daunting task to stand in a bare, concrete room with heating machinery hanging from the ceiling and an overhead door gracing the back wall with the task of arranging an Orthodox Church. There was virtually no money (I signed the lease at $800 a month – a scary proposition at the time).
We owned a few icons (small 8×10’s). It was an improvement over the living room we had used for the previous month or so in that it was empty and could remain “set up” throughout the week rather than being dismantled. My most expensive contribution to the effort was a small gate-legged antique table from my home. We set it up and it served as an analogion for the reader’s service that was our standard Sunday effort. We set an icon of Christ and an icon of the Theotokos on wire-framed music stands. Nothing gave the impression: “this is a Church.”
A great drawback was that the warehouse had no air-conditioning. Sunday mornings our first summer began with a tolerable cool and quickly rose into the 80’s and more as the Tennessee sunshine baked the building. We added floor fans.
We made our first major effort at changing our space with the addition of an icon screen. We gathered on a Saturday morning, purchasing and assembling the elements of a rough framed drywall across the Eastern end of the room. It’s fairly easy to take 2×4’s and build an 8 foot wall across a room. We added drywall with three spaces to constitute the “doors.” We began the morning in a warehouse, and strangely, by the time for Reader’s Vespers, the structure of the iconostasis was in place, the icons hung (we had bought two large-ish icons of Christ and the Theotokos) and the miracle began.
I have heard from critics of Orthodoxy across the years that the iconostasis “hides the altar.” In point of fact, it does the opposite. At the beginning of the day, my sad little gate-legged table, set aside for the work, was placed within the newly created altar space, and was transformed into altar. The iconostasis doesn’t hide anything – it reveals.
I have stood in magnificent Orthodox temples, with highly developed iconostases, magnificent frescoes, abundant gold leaf and every sort of decoration, but none have ever spoken more loudly than that newly-constructed wall.
An iconostasis is not just any wall. It stands fixed between heaven and earth. Its doors are portals into the age to come. That early rough construction in a warehouse transformed the space into the house of God, or rather, revealed it to be what it already was.
Such is the nature of a sacrament.
Icons are called “windows to heaven.” Such a name implies that there is something to be seen, though it requires a window. The same is true of the iconostasis. There is something to which we are united, a heavenly throne to be made manifest, though it requires something by which to be manifested.
Yet more interesting is the teaching that these somewhat “external” realities are also “internal” realities of the heart. From the Macarian Homilies:
Because visible things are the type and shadow of hidden ones, and the visible temple a type of the Temple of the heart, and the priest a type of the true priest of the grace of Christ, and all the rest of the sequence of the visible arrangement a type of the rational and hidden matters of the inner man, we receive the visible arrangement and administration of the Church as a pattern of what is at work in the soul by grace. (Homilies, 52.2.1)
This is why we find an “affinity” for the Liturgy of the Church, one that is often beyond words. We have a feel for such things even when we have ceased to believe in them. For example, there were likely very few in attendance at the coronation of King Charles III who actually believe that an anointed king is anything other than a treasured (by some) relic of the past. Yet the pageantry was moving.
The same culture recently held a “rave in the nave” at Canterbury Cathedral, underlining the emptiness of the present ruling Church regime. Oddly, even the “rave” is a strange secular acknowledgement of the power of the space. A rave would be a rather “ho-hum” event in a nondescript venue. Its attraction is found in the building itself – though a rave is one of the least likely activities to pierce the doorway into the eternal.
The perception of God, and of all things divine, often begins with the experience of awe and wonder. Both are subset experiences of healthy shame. In a culture that is strangely bound by shame, it ceaselessly and shamelessly shatters every proper boundary, finding no wonder or awe other than the worst commodifications of human passions. Pornography has become an epidemic, though it is a mockery of human sexuality. We fail to understand that only self-restraint and modesty, as well as marriage itself, make possible the true perception of wonder in the presence of the naked beloved.
The modern heart has become the meanest warehouse of human experience. It is cluttered with experience but lacks the “order” necessary to reveal the greater depths that would make proper sense of who we are. Interestingly, that order, particularly in the Liturgy, was described by St. Dionysius the Areopagite as “hierarchy” (he actually coined the word for that description). There is a “hierarchy” in the Divine Liturgy, an ordering of space, an ordering of words, an ordering of ministries, all of which serve both the revelation of the Body and Blood of God on the altar, but also as a “patterning” and “type” of the mystical altar of the heart. The instinct of the Church is that you cannot enter the latter without the practice of the former. The absence of either leads to problems.
A key turning point in my life, during my thesis (“The Icon as Theology”) defense, came with the question, “Do you believe the veneration of icons to be necessary to salvation?” I hesitated (I was an Anglican priest at the time), and responded, “I believe that their veneration is necessary to its fullness.” I have lived with that answer for many years and pondered it and the question as well. Christ, according to the Scriptures, is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). I cannot imagine a salvation that is somehow separate from the veneration, indeed, the worship of that Icon.
The visible icons of the Church, including the wall of icons that points us to the center of all creation, all serve as types of the invisible Icon that resides in heaven and within the human heart. Learning to see what is truly there is a lesson taught by veneration, by worship, by attention, and by the noetic perception that is the gift of the Spirit.
A wall is so much more than a wall.
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