Willa Cather meets Cormac McCarthy in the Iconoclastic Controversy

Like many reverts to the faith, my second conversion, as it were, was prompted in no small part by an intense study of the Church Fathers and encounters with Beauty. Not one to have given much of a second glance to sacred art before that time, I remember quite clearly my immediate reaction to finishing The Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great: I commissioned an icon.

What’s the link or relationship there? Though I didn’t have it explicitly worked out at the time, it seems obvious to me now: I had (to paraphrase a line from Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series) forgotten the face of my father. Reading the Fathers had brought me back into the territory of my Father’s Kingdom, but who could reveal His face? Intuitively, I reached for an icon—and a store-bought one, no matter how impressive the provenance, would not do.

The process of commissioning an icon was more involved than I at first supposed. The icon writer, who was Orthodox, had a two-year waiting list, which I took to be a good sign, if not one that would help me grow in patience. He asked me to agree to a set of conditions ahead of time, including where the icon would reside, what might happen to it in the future, under what circumstances it should be covered or revealed, what my intentions were for it, and the like. He made sure I understood that he undertook the writing of an icon within the disciplines of prayer and fasting, and he encouraged me to do the same.

Clearly, the writing of an icon was spiritually serious business. And that holy fear—the wonder and awe of what goes into asking to cooperate with our Lord in the creation of an image through which He gazes upon us—was exactly the recovery and rejuvenation my soul was craving.

Something of this awesome sense of divine gravity permeates Steven Faulkner’s short novel The Image.

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