It was a Christmas gift: a one day retreat workshop on creating icons with transfers – workshop because it was hands-on, retreat because creating icons is a profoundly theological prayer practice. The other participants all had some background in art, from college minors to art school grads to experienced iconographers. For them, picking up the brush was easy – it was the praying part that was challenging. For me, the praying part was easy – it was picking up the brush that was challenging.

Our teacher, Marek Czarnecki, told us that creating icons (writing/painting – he wasn’t fussed about the term) is a process of making our prayers something physical and beautiful through our hands. Through those brushes, a personal prayer becomes a beautiful means of prayer for others. The prayer for creating icons: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The Jesus Prayer.

Marek said more than once that creating an icon was a matter of self-confidence and justification. We needed to trust in our ability to do the work and accept that the time and energy devoted to this prayer practice is justified (not selfish or merely a hobby).

I didn’t doubt that a spiritual practice was justified – I’ve set aside the time for decades. I very much doubted, and still do, that an icon will come from my brush. The others struggled with the exact opposite issue – no doubt about the ability to create but doubtful that taking the time to do so was justified.

At the end of the workshop, all of us had created a transfer pattern of the icon of Saint John the Baptizer as a spiritual practice. Here’s mine:

It’s not clean enough to be the basis for an icon, and I didn’t finish half of his mustache, but it’s the first time I’ve tried to pray with a paint brush (creating Celtic knots with gel pens is as close as I’ve gotten). I haven’t figured out how to turn what I see and what I pray into ink on acetate. But I can see the underlying structure, the lines that form the basis of an icon, in a way I never did before. I got the chance to learn from someone whose prayers and talent come together to create icons – beauty that draws us into God’s embrace. I doubt there could be a better way to spend a Saturday in June…

[The workshop was on Ender’s Island, in Mystic, Connecticut – home of St. Edmund’s Retreat. www.endersisland.org. Marek Czarnecki leads many workshops here.]