Every Face an Icon
By Jenna Funkhouser
“If someone turns with his spiritual world toward the spiritual world of another person,” Eastern Orthodox saint and martyr Maria Skobtsova once reflected, “he encounters an awesome and inspiring mystery...He comes into contact with the true image of God in man, with the very icon of God incarnate in the world.”
For those in the faith, we hold to scripture’s teaching that man was made uniquely in the image of God. The Church Fathers recognized that this imago dei gave man a specific role and dignity in the created world. “When you see your brother, you see God,” Clement of Alexandria wrote in the second century, a statement that echoes the words of Christ in Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
But the question remains: If each person we encounter is truly an image of God, what could possibly be an adequate response? How can we authentically “receive all as Christ,” as St. Benedict commanded?
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I spent a lot of time thinking about this question the year I met Mama Anna. Wrapped in traditional Maasai fabrics and wielding one of the largest smiles I have ever seen, she carried herself with assurance and a good deal of no-nonsense spunk. Even though she told me herself that she had never lived beyond that few hundred miles of rural Tanzania, I could imagine her hoisting herself in the same confident manner right down Wall Street, swinging her slender walking stick, finding the whole situation immensely entertaining.
We share maybe five words in each other’s language. To hear her story I asked questions in English, which were translated by my colleague, Philip, into Swahili, who then asked another young woman, Maria, to translate from Swahili into Maasai. Mama Anna would reply, and the whole game of telephone would reverse and begin again. Our conversation was stilted to say the least, yet I found myself fascinated by the other half of the story written across her lively face. Its deep lines told of years of hard labor under the burning Tanzanian sun; the set of her mouth was the patience of a woman from whom silence had often been called for; and yet her eyes were young and mischievous, full of determination and hope. When she spoke of her desire to see the children in her village have a school, she glowed with purpose. Now this is a woman, I thought, who is fully and entirely alive.
With just a few words to aid us, it was as if we were reaching a level of communication that passed beyond the need for explanation and entered the level of the soul. I thought of the words Jacob spoke to Esau: “to see your face is for me like seeing the face of God” (Gen. 33:10).
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The Second Nicene Council (AD 787) gathered to address the controversy surrounding the use of icons. Where was the boundary line, they asked, between the adoration of the sacred and the worshipping of something made by man?
The fathers concluded that it was indeed proper to venerate sacred images, arguing,
Certainly this is not the full adoration…in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honoured and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred [objects]…Indeed, the honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching the model, and he who venerates the image, venerates the person represented in that image (Papal Encyclicals Online).
Icons are a window: a meeting place where we encounter eternity in time. One could almost say they are sacramental, a channel of divine grace. In the words of Leonid Ouspensky, “The icon visibly captures an individual who has become a living icon, a true likeness of God. The icon does not represent the divinity. Rather, it indicates the human’s participation in the divine life.”
This is why their perspective is inverted—as if eternity was breaking in on us. They show no shadows, for there are no shadows in the kingdom of God, where everything is bathed in light.
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And yet, for every friendship I gain, I pass hundreds of strangers on the street each day. If I really met each one as Christ, I thought, I could spend my entire life down on my knees.
I decided to practice the presence of people, the contemplation of these living icons, very simply. I could not bow down and venerate each person I passed, but I could walk through my day with eyes wide open to what they might reveal to me. Since it happened to be winter and the middle of a pandemic, all I had to go off of was eyes. As I passed someone on the street, I would briefly and intentionally meet their gaze. And I would smile.
How much time have you spent looking into the eyes of strangers? It seemed to me that I had never seen such an array of light. I thought of thundereggs, split in one swift stroke of a hatchet to reveal their inner fire. You can stare at the night sky for hours, and nothing will come to greet you like this brief flash of shy and eager life.
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“There are no ordinary people,” claimed C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory. “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations––these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit–– immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
Every human we meet is a unique and never-ending expression of the creative intentions of our Triune God. As independent as we aim to be, it is only in relationships that the image of God is wholly revealed in each of us. The road to God leads through other people. Yet how often do we pass someone by in pursuit of something more “interesting,” blind to the fact that nothing in the created universe is as complex and astonishing as they?
Could it be that our way of looking at others is dimmed by the shadow of our own selves? We seem unable to look past our own prejudices or preoccupations and see the other person clearly. At first glance, they appear to us like an interruption, a distraction, maybe even a problem to be solved.
Look again: their face is revealing to you the glory of God.
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After I met Mama Anna, I rode three hours back down a bumpy dirt road, picked up my suitcase, and headed to the Kilimanjaro International Airport. You could say that since that day, I have been on a journey of appearing: a journey of showing up to my life, and the people in it. Of claiming that this life is worthy of a full and embodied presence in the world; that these are the conditions given for communion with God.
There is nothing sentimental about this way of seeing. The sacrament of human presence is turbulent and unpredictable; in our broken world it is often filled with pain. If it is a window, it is frequently a grimy one, requiring a forgiving eye.
As with written icons, to see others as an icon of God requires a posture of patient and curious contemplation, looking to learn rather than control, to attend to the radiance of their mystery rather than to influence or to understand. This kind of contemplation is only possible if we are able to stand before our fellow humans in candid humility: if we can see them not as conundrums or competition but as carriers of the divine spark—whether or not they themselves recognize it. It requires reciprocity: we must be willing not just to see, but to be revealed.
“If we are indifferent to the image of God in other people,” Jim Forest writes in Praying With Icons, “we won’t find that image in icons.”
The more I stand at the window and watch the saints go by, the more I have learned: there is no other way.
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“Do not go out and buy icons. Go downtown and look at Christ in the faces of the poor,” a priest suggested in Praying With Icons.
But can a person really live this way? This is the question I have sought to answer, and I have found its rejoinder in the lives of the saints—the most human of us all.
In times of great suffering and darkness, it is those who hold the front line of humanity—who refuse to lose the vision of imago dei—that carry the spark most brightly. Mother Maria Skobtsova, quoted in the introduction, spent the last months of her life in a Nazi concentration camp where she did exactly this. Surrounded by brutality and nightmare on every side, she nevertheless organized intellectual discussions, created art, and formed groups of mutual aid that kept the flame of dignity and humanity alive even in the most inhumane of conditions.
Mother Maria believed that in relationships with others we encounter “a reflection of the mystery of God's incarnation and divine manhood.” In an essay entitled “The Second Gospel Commandment,” she further unfolds this vision:
And [man] needs to accept this awesome revelation of God unconditionally, to venerate the image of God in his brother. Only when he senses, perceives and understands it will yet another mystery be revealed to him—one that will demand his most dedicated efforts... He will perceive that the divine image is veiled, distorted and disfigured by the power of evil... And he will want to engage in battle with the devil for the sake of the divine image.
It is this way of seeing that icons invite us into: a beholding which incites becoming, and a window into the generous and creative interplay always possible between humanity and God.
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There is a call to prayer that broadcasts from outside my window. It goes like this: First, you hear the pained but incoherent words of an older gentleman—intoxicated, unwell. He is my neighbor.
The words grow louder. Then they culminate to the loud and anguished wail, “Oh, God!”
Repeat.
I don’t know what to do with a cry like this. No matter the inducement, it obviously comes from a place of deep, deep pain. And every day, when I hear his voice in the same inflection, “Oh, God!”, I find my heart responding, Hear our prayer. Like the voice crying in the wilderness, like the anguished prophets of old, like the prayer of all the desolate and deserted: Lord, have mercy.
One night, shortly after one of these calls to prayer, our evening readings held Psalm 31. When I reached verse ten, I immediately saw in my mind’s eye the face of this neighbor. “Be gracious to me, Lord, for I am in distress.” As I continued, I could almost hear his voice reading aloud with me: “To all my foes I am a thing of scorn, / and especially to my neighbors / a horror to my friends. / When they see me in public, / they quickly shy away” (Ps. 31:12).
Then suddenly, my viewpoint shifted. I was filled with the realization that this was Christ’s psalm, that He was praying it along with me, and through me; that it was His voice who identified with this suffering. And in a flash I saw that my neighbor was showing me the face of Christ.
Who am I, after all I read of the ways God is at work in the world, to doubt that this neighbor of mine is closer to the heart of Christ than I will ever be? Who am I, after claiming to follow a Savior who was “despised and rejected by men,” who had “no place to lay his head,” to fail to see this image of my Savior before my very eyes?
Instead, with Christ, I will pray these words over both of us:
“But I trust in you, LORD; / I say, ‘You are my God’” (Ps. 33:15).
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“…[S]ave me in your mercy” (Ps. 33:17b).
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“Do not let me be put to shame, / for I have called to you, Lord” (Ps. 33:18a).
