The Journey into Iconography: A Pilgrim Remembers
by Father William Hart McNichols



"Freely you were given, freely give." Matthew 10:8


"You gaze on the icon, but it gazes on you too. When you are looking at someone you love, and they are looking at you, there is a lot that is communicated that cannot be put in words. We need to gaze truly conversational, truly loving images…images that will return our love."

-- Father William Hart McNichols

In an essay on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, Roland Barthes, the brilliant scholar of semiotics, comments that this small book, which was long supposed to be of little literary value, is actually one that creates a whole new language. In its painstaking attention to sensory and contemplative detail, it is also a potential school for writers and image makers.

Many schools of prayers would warn their students about visions and the use of images. Luther and the Reformation would cry, "The ear, the ear alone is the Christian organ." The Flemish and Spanish mystics would further caution against the praying imagination, pointing to the cloud, the darkness, and the void en route to God.

Barthes claims that "to these mistrustings of the image Ignatius responded with a radical imperialism of the image: product of the guided imagination, the image is the abiding material of the Exercises…. It can be said that Ignatius takes as much trouble filling the spirit with images as the mystics (Christian and Buddhists) do in emptying them out."

I had no idea, when I traveled from New York to Albuquerque in September 1990 to begin an apprenticeship in iconography with the Russian-American master Robert Lentz, just how much my life would change. I had no idea I was entering into a novitiate of Eastern Christian spirituality, standing before and ancient vocation, which preceded even the earliest of religious orders, and arose in the Church during the fourth century.

During the first two centuries of labor and birth of discipleship of Jesus Christ, Christians began marking the catacombs with vivid, secret graffiti. There was Christ the lamb, the fish, the anchor, the Eucharistic bread and wine, and the legendary savior of the underworld, Orpheus. There were spreading palms, crosses, arrows, peacocks, phoenixes in flames, and other encoded symbols of martyrdom. By the year 400, icons were taking their place, replacing, subverting emperor worship. Into the vast marketplace of encaustic funerary portraits, metal medallions, and carved plaques, flowed an abundance of heavenly friends speaking of a kingdom more real and lasting than any human could contrive or force to earth. The gracious river was not to run uninterrupted for long. By 726, icons were outlawed, iconographers exiled, maimed or murdered. In theological conflict, the Byzantine world was divided between iconoclasts and icnodules.

The Iconoclastic era lasted until 843. The great defender of the Incarnation and thus icons, St. John Damascene (we celebrate his feast on December 4), bravely wrote his treatise, On the Divine Images despite the violence and danger around him. In retaliation his hand was cut off. He brought the severed hand to the Hodegetria (She Who Shows the Way) icon of the Mother of God, and was healed. St. John then added a third hand to her image. It is venerated to this day as The Three Handed Icon of the Mother of God.

A Time of Preparation

Looking back now I do not thin God could have provided a better education for this work of iconography than the ten years I spent in New York. I moved to New York, with the permission of my superior, in 1980 to be enrolled in the Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, in pursuit of a master of fine arts degree. For three years I studied at Pratt, and for the next seven years I illustrated about twenty-seven books for Paulist Press and other publishers. A large portion of these books were children's books, and this was continually challenging work. To consciously enter into the spirit of a child and find images for stories was imaginative and joy-filled work.

"I would never have known the tender, protective, apprehensive gaze of the mother of God holding her child, if I had not known the same powerful love of my own mother."
In 1983 the ominously growing numbers of people with HIV-AIDS began to explode throughout the area. I was invited in September of that year to preside at a liturgy of healing and anointing for the sick and a handful of caregivers. After that a whole new ministry began. This lasted until 1990 and seemed like on extended period. I was in and out of apartments, houses, and hospitals all over New York and New Jersey, and gave retreats and talks to an increasing number of interested groups in the United States and Canada. In 1986 a group of people asked for a healing Mass, and that was held monthly at Our Lady of Guadalupe church on 14th Street in Manhattan. This healing ministry also required an apprenticeship, and I sought help from the gifted Sister Ann Tubman RSHM. My primary work, however, was with the extraordinary hospise team of St. Vincent's Hospital, led by the compassionate visionary, Sister Patrice Murphy SC.

Some experiences are so indelible and profound that they inform you for the rest of your life. What remains before me now is the sacred, trembling intimacy given in those years. In hospice work the veil between this world and the life to come is very thin. Some people drift over and back in the final stages of their life. Their glimpses of the unconditional love of God, their descriptions of glistening landscapes, make our world seem washed in grays. All this was very real to me and I confess sometimes I wanted to go with them. People who are dying are often blunt, honest, and extremely focused. Communion with them becomes the gathering of a lengthy shared prayer. This is also the vocation and work of the iconographer. Perhaps we never really achieve this in our task, but it forms such a blessed goal to desire.

Struggling to learn the precise craft of an illustrator while being a midwife to the second birth of hundreds of dying young people, I found this life a great preparation for the work and prayer of icons. I wrote of these experiences as best I could in two small books: The Stations of the Cross of a Person with AIDS and a book of poetry called Fire Above, Water Below.

One of the reasons you rarely see a signature on an icon is that the image is supposed to have appeared, to have been given by the sacred one who is praying with the painter, from heaven. It is the essence of the Matthean prayer to knock at the door and to be answered. If you sign the work, you are to write: by the hand of the sinner (and the iconographer's name) William Hart McNichols. This keeps the worker and the viewer aware that the vocation of the iconographer is to call beyond to the holy ones and beg them to be present in the icon, so that others may be converse with them. Even in the most primitive and crude icons, something of this brush with heaven can be seen and felt. It is not, therefore, artistic ability or technique that finally makes an icon live. In fact, many of the old and new iconographers are not really artists, as we would use that term. It is the hope and the prayer of the painter, answered by the sheer extravagance of God, that breathes life into the image. "Ask and it shall be given, seek and you shall find." (Matthew 7:7).







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Page Last Updated: June 15, 2002