This past month at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church, we had the great blessing to see two of the holy icons on our iconostasis restored, that of our Lord Jesus Christ and his all-pure mother. Their images have been renewed and brought into the likeness of their original beauty. This was made possible by a generous pilgrim who visited the parish this summer, and through the expert and prayerful work of iconographer and icon-restorer Tatiana McWethy.
The icons originally came to St. Nicholas as a gift, along with the iconostasis itself, from Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1894, just after the construction of the church. Yees Gaanaalx, elder of the L’eeneidi clan, along with his wife, gave the land for the church to be built. When the elder and around 700 other Tlingit requested to receive holy baptism, they desired and asked that a church would be built in Juneau so that the people could come and offer Christian worship there. Through the many gifts given by the local Tlingit, townspeople, and other Orthodox Christians worldwide, St. Nicholas was built and adorned.
The iconostasis icons at St. Nicholas have been here for all 130 years of the parish’s existence, making visible the hidden reality of Christ and his heavenly kingdom to the faithful who come and worship in their presence. Originally painted in Russia by expert iconographers of the St. Petersburg school, this is the first time they have received restoration.
The restoration of the icons here provides a fruitful analogy to a common theme in Orthodox Christian theology: that of image and likeness.
We read in Genesis that in creating mankind, God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Properly speaking, the image of God the Father is His Son, the one who himself is True God just as His Father is. This one who is True God also becomes true man in Jesus Christ, the one who fulfills perfectly what it is to be a human being made in the image of God. It is in the image of Jesus Christ that all other human persons are made.
While the “image” refers to this core reality and value of every human being that can never be effaced, the “likeness” refers to the potential that every person has to conform himself according to the pattern of the image of Christ in which he or she has been made.
Like the icons at St. Nicholas, we begin our lives in the pure, newly minted image of the prototype. Even so, we may begin with difficulties already stacked against us. For the icons, they first underwent a long, wet journey; they were installed in a place with great variation in temperature and humidity; their day-to-day life has been lived in the presence of smoke from the burning of candles, oil and incense. It was more or less a foregone conclusion that the likeness would become obscured from the original image through time and circumstance.
For us, we likewise are born into a reality of generational and genetic habits and predispositions, and we live in homes and environments with all sorts of pressures, urging us to respond in one way or another. Whereas the icons ultimately are just paint on wood or canvas — objects, albeit holy ones — and simply succumb to the environmental factors, we are true images, endowed with freedom in the image of our Creator. We may freely conform ourselves to his likeness, even when it seems the deck is stacked against us.
This does not mean that we always act perfectly; but it does mean that when we fail, we repent, and we bring ourselves back to the pattern of the image of Christ in which we’re made.
For the icons, as they’ve become dimmed with soot, the canvas rippled through weathering, and bits of the image torn away, they were restored through being cleaned with harsh chemicals, their canvases detached, pulled, re-stretched, and touched up through the application of new paint. If the icons could feel, this would not have been a pleasant, but rather a painful process. It is the same for us in our lives: opportunities arise for us to release ourselves into the hands of God, responding to joys and difficulties according to his will and teachings. Through holding fast to him, he cleanses us of our accumulated mire, he purifies us, stretches us, and restores the beauty of the image in which we have been made.
We invite you to come and see these two newly restored icons at St. Nicholas, to stand before the serenely joyful gaze of the icon of Christ, truly in his presence. It is in that presence, gazing upon the glory of the Lord in worship, that we ourselves, icons made in his image, are “transformed into the same image from glory to glory, by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).
• Maxim Gibson is the rector at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Juneau. “Living & Growing” is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders. It appears every Saturday on the Juneau Empire’s Faith page.
