Use icons to pray this Lent

Intermountain Catholic

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Icon of Saint Mary Magdalene in the Cathedral of the Madeleine

SALT LAKE CITY — Prayer is one of the three pillars of Lent. While vocal prayer is perhaps the most common, the Catholic Church also recognizes the value of meditation and contemplation.

As with vocal prayer, there are different methods of meditation and contemplation. One form of meditation is visio divina (Latin for “divine seeing”), in which a person uses a religious painting to help focus his or her prayer. These images are known as icons; the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “Christian iconography expresses in images the same Gospel message that Scripture communicates by words.”

In the eighth century, controversy erupted over whether icons represented a form of idolatry. In response, the Second Council of Nicea ruled that holy icons may be venerated, and that images of Jesus, Mary, angels and saints teach people “to commemorate and to love their prototype” and that “the honor rendered to the icon reaches the prototype.”

This teaching has been repeated in various Church documents, including Pope John Paul II’s 1987 apostolic letter Duodecimum Saeculum, which was written on the occasion of the 1200th anniversary of the Second Council of Nicaea.

A painted icon “allows those who contemplate it to accede to the mystery of salvation by the sense of sight,” John Paul II wrote.

Indeed, in the sixth century, Saint Gregory the Great defended paintings in the churches as a way to help teach people who couldn’t read.

Gregory went so far as to chastise Bishop Serenus of Marseille for permitting his fraternity to break icons in churches. Softening his criticism, Gregory wrote that “we commend you indeed for your zeal against anything made with hands being an object of adoration; but we signify to you that you ought not to have broken these images. For pictorial representation is made use of in churches for this reason; that such as are ignorant of letters may at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books. Your Fraternity therefore should have both preserved the images and prohibited the people from adoration of them, to the end that both those who are ignorant of letters might have wherewith to gather a knowledge of the history, and that the people might by no means sin by adoration of a pictorial representation.”

Here Gregory makes the distinction that the person who is depicted in the icon – not the icon itself – is to be venerated, but only God is to be worshiped. Or, as John Paul II phrased it in his letter Duodecimum Saeculum “art can represent the form, the effigy of God’s human face and lead the one who contemplates it to the ineffable mystery of God made man for our salvation.”

More recently, Pope Francis suggested that “every family should look to the icon of the Holy Family of Nazareth” because “We need to enter into the mystery of Jesus’ birth, into that ‘yes’ given by Mary to the message of the angel, when the Word was conceived in her womb, as well as the ‘yes’ of Joseph, who gave a name to Jesus and watched over Mary,” the Holy Father wrote in his 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia.

Numerous other aspects of the Holy Family can be brought out while contemplating the icon, Francis writes: the joy of the shepherds before the manger, the adoration of the Magi, and the flight into Egypt, Zechariah’s joy at the birth of John the Baptist, the fulfilment of the promise made known to Simeon and Anna in the temple, and the marvel of the teachers when the 12-year-old Jesus spoke in the temple.

To pray with visio divina, choose the icon you wish to pray with. Put yourself in a prayerful state, then examine every detail of the icon. One or more of the details will draw your attention. Meditate on those details, asking yourself what message God has for you through those details. Then respond to God’s message with your prayer. Finally, rest in God’s presence before closing your meditation with a prayer.