By Robert Hudson Westover
Who hasn’t turned the wheel of a kaleidoscope and looked in
amazement as a hidden cluster of crystal beads, painted mirrors and glass create
color patterns that make you wish you could jump into that little handheld toy?
Of course, now we have virtual reality goggles which almost make one feel like
they are doing this—diving us into a galaxy of iridescence--but virtual isn’t
reality.
However, in Paris, the City of Light, such a place does
exist, a real structure made of stone and glass but mostly stained glass. It’s
the chapel built over 800 years ago by the good king of the French, Saint Louis,
and the Parisians call it the saint’s chapel or Sainte Chappelle. From the moment
you step into this sacred space of a million fragments of colored glass you are
transfixed by the eye sensory overload of so much color.
 |
| Sainte Chapelle in Paris |
You are in the kaleidoscope.
And it’s in this place of Holy wonderment that my husband
and I had a rare encounter with a person who studies and creates, or I should
correctly say, writes the spiritual arts of sacred colors that prefigured the
glowing stained glass imagines of Biblical scenes seen in so many churches and
cathedrals.
It’s called iconography
and the artist’s name is Sue Jones. A devote Christian from Texas, Sue had
never really liked icons and thought the (often) small rough wood blocks with
two dimensional painted figures of Jesus and his mother, Mary (and many other
saints) almost ugly and even kind of strange.
 |
| An icon of the Archangel Gabriel by iconographer Sue Jones |
However, all that changed when she started visiting an icon “writing” class held at her church, “I started understanding the significance of the meaning behind icons. An icon is to be written, not painted, and read by the onlooker,” said Jones.
The class is called The School of Sacred Arts and the master
iconographer leading the course, Jane Ladik, has her work all over the world.
Jones explains the icon writing process taught to her by Ladik as one that starts with
a pattern and the writer is always referring to the pattern, “just as we refer
to our master pattern, Jesus Christ.”
Jones
added, “Back in the day when people could not read, they would know what they
were looking at, the
colors have a message, and other things you see, curly hair, a knob on the
forehead, even where the eyes are looking. Writing an icon is done in prayer,
contemplating the life of the saint.”
In
fact, when you see Mary, or the saints, it indeed does appear that the eyes are
often not looking in the same place. Jones explains that this is because the
icon both looks at the observer while also keeping an eye on the heavenly
realm.
 |
Listening to Sue that day in Sainte Chapelle, and feeling the holy spirit move me, I looked up at the many images of the stained glass and thought about the stories of faith they were telling and experienced the chapel with new eyes. Iconography, whether in wood, stone glass or paint inspires us all to love God more and experience the promise of his Love through art.
Let’s
call it the kaleidoscope of the Holy Spirit.
(Pictured to the left: An ancient icon of Mary and Jesus. The lettering is in archaic Cyrillic and the icon is thought to have written anywhere between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.)
