A gallery of icons: Dana Smith’s Thought for the week
‘My Friends’ faces on Zoom are my close quilt of icons.’
Sunday morn: our faces are poured through space and time. Some of these Zoom bodies are located in kitchens, or front rooms looking outwards; others sit, eyes closed in front of panoramic heavenly backdrops of valley, hill and sky. Somehow these points of light, these million colourful pixels, constitute something recognisable that invites me to drop into the seed within.
My Friends’ faces on Zoom are my close quilt of icons. Rowan Williams says that icons do at least three things: they remind us of the continuity of blessings; they protect us in some essential ways; they call us to be living witnesses.
Icons like faces are temporal and eternal: when they die, I will remember them. When I die, they might do the same. For now we shape each other’s lives.
In my mind, I see the face of our friend whose ashes now lie in the garden behind our Meeting House. As a scientist, she valued life: a tea towel hung in her bathroom testified to her ecology. It instructed how to clean the house using bicarbonate of soda, vinegar, lemon. She examined water droplets under a microscope, watching a rainforest of bacteria bloom. The ages of earth were labelled on a shelf. Jurassic: ammonites and belemnites. In the last, a human footprint was labelled ‘Anthropocene’.
Some say that icons are channels of divine action and they reflect that capacity back to us. We are imperfect and we are saturated by Presence.
These faces of Friends remind me to direct my gaze outward. They comfort and they can also disturb and challenge me. Some of these friends only use public transport; others will book rooms in London to get in the way of weapons of war. These Sunday morning faces relocate me with the company of saints.
Williams tells of the folk belief that icons are located in the house in a space called ‘the beautiful place’. If a person speaks ill of others, someone will direct that the icons be removed. They cannot witness our wrong doing.
Icons remind us of our personal and communal responsibilities. They surround us with a vision of what a holy life might be. They are whole, reminding me of my own integrity.
Thirty years ago in Zagorsk monastery in Russia, I watched children run in from the snow; their sledges were propped against walls. They scrambled into warmth, to light candles in front of saints’ images, while their babushkas kissed the holy icons. These icons were their ‘familiars’, just as these Sunday Zoom faces are my familiars, reminding me of the discipline of our Quaker faith and practice.
On the Zoom screen, eyes may be closed, or looking into a distance, or seemingly looking into mine. Friends may sit in apple-green rooms, or book-lined ones, or under trees in a garden. Wherever they are in time or space, these faces, these icons, are doorways: blessing, challenging and lending me strength.
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