A little twist on iconography...

This past Friday was my 24th birthday.  It was a very enjoyable day.  I received a lot of birthday wishes from people on Facebook, and it was good seeing some messages from people I hadn't heard from in a long time.  We had a little celebration at work that consisted of cake and being sung to by my co-workers, which is usually happens when one of the employee's birthdays falls on a work day.  It was rather amusing because I was sung to by all my male co-workers because our secretary wasn't there and she's the only other female in the office.  After work, I got a call from my grandma and my mom, and in the evening, I went into downtown Lancaster with some friends to walk around Gallery Row and Queen Street for First Friday.  Overall, it was a good birthday. :)

Yesterday evening, I went to eat at Pub Dunegal in Mount Joy with my closest friends, Kyle, Brian, and Sharon.  They belong to the same parish as me and they work in youth ministry along with me.  We've all been so busy the past few months, so we were finally able to hang out together, just the four of us, for a little birthday celebration.  For my birthday, Kyle asked me to look online for pictures of some of my favorite icons to give to him because he was going to make a carving of one for me for my birthday.  How was he going to do this ?  Well, he's a cabinet maker/woodworker by profession, and he recently got this really awesome machine called a Carvewright.  This machine is computerized and has a desktop program with it that allows you to create designs with lettering and images, and then it carves the finished design onto a piece of wood.  So, I went out and found two icons, one of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and one of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  He ended up using the Our Lady of Mount Carmel image, which looked like this:

The image itself is only about 300 x 386.  He put the above image into the program, and here's the result:

I was blown away by it!  He took this fairly small image and carved it onto an 11" x 13" piece of pine.  The image also has some stain on it to bring out the deeper crevices on the image.

Now, this is NOT traditional iconography at all.  Icons are painted on paper with certain, theologically-defined colors and then mounted on a piece of wood.  In this case, the idea of carving the image of an icon into wood was, I thought, very intriguing.  I don't think I'd keep collecting or wanting carved icons, but I thought it was such a neat idea that I had to see what it looked like.

The painting of an icon can actually a very moving, spiritual, and sacred process.  In traditional iconography (which is more of an Eastern Catholic Church tradition, though icons do appear in the Western Church), the person who wants to create an icon spends a period time in retreat with prayer and fasting before starting to paint it.  At this point, the person may not even know what image he or she will use in the icon, but during the retreat, the person will pray to God for inspiration on what image he or she should paint.  Once an image is determined, the person will start the work and continue to be recollected in prayer since the image he or she is working on is sacred.  At each brush stroke, the person says a prayer, and the most common prayer said is the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."  Can you imagine trying to pray a simple prayer at every stroke?  In the end, it could take many months for one icon to be painted.

Of course, Kyle and I show no disrespect toward the Eastern tradition of iconography with a carving that only took six hours to create by machine.  This was more of an experiment (and also a really awesome birthday gift!).  I will always love traditional iconography more than anything else, and I will have to dedicate a more extensive blog post to discussing it!