Harvard Divinity Bullentin, 2011.
IN 2005, SEEKING ADVENTURE and the solitude of pilgrimage, I bicycled from my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to an Orthodox Christian monastery in West Virginia, where I stayed for three months. From there I continued on to my uncle’s apartment just outside New Orleans. Low on cash, I filled out job applications until, three weeks later, I heard back from one. My uncle drove me to Venice, Louisiana, the southernmost point of the state, affectionately called by Louisianans “the end of the world.” He dropped me off at 4 AM, and I waited for a helicopter to take me still further, past marshes and grassy wetlands, to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico.
Pluralism Project, Harvard University.
The collage above forms a collective iconostasis, or icon screen, from pictures of Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches throughout greater Boston.
In this tradition, Christians believe the Incarnation of the Son of God revealed to all humanity the image of the Father. Through taking human form the entire material world was made holy, the cosmos transfigured. Saints are thought to achieve deification in their lifetimes through the emulation of Christ, fulfilling the role of humanity as created in the image of God. Icons—which in Greek translates as image, likeness, or portrait—are thus images of the images of God. The following slide show features the altars and namesake icons of various Orthodox and Eastern Christian churches of Boston.
In For Such a Time as This: Young Adults on the Future of the Church, edited by Mary Lohre (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2014).
