Greetings!
As we look ahead to our 2027 Icon Classes and next year’s pilgrimage, Balkan Grace, even as we prepare to depart very soon for our 2026 Montenegro, Serbia, and Italy pilgrimage, I wish to share with you several writings that have been taking shape during these past few years.
I offer them in the spirit of something I have come to understand ever more deeply:
The work of the iconographer is never merely to paint.
It is to stand before the Mystery with reverence.
To listen.
To receive.
To give thanks.
And then, with humility, to offer what has been received for the life of others.
The icon teaches us that nothing truly belongs to us—not the image, not the gift, not even the revelation that may come through the work of our hands. We receive, and in thanksgiving, we offer it back.
Perhaps pilgrimage teaches us something very similar. We leave what is familiar, encounter what has been handed down through generations before us, and return changed—not simply because of what we have seen, but because of what we have been given eyes to see.
It is in this spirit that I share these writings with you.
As one pilgrimage prepares to begin and another already waits upon the horizon, I find myself returning to the beautiful words with which the Divine Liturgy sends us back into the world:
“Let us depart in peace.”
Not because our worship has ended, but because what we have received is now ours to carry into the world.
With profound gratitude in Christ,
Deb
The Horse and the Dragon Contemplating the Making of an Icon
Dedication
To the Holy Orthodox Church,
who taught me to see.
To my teachers,
who patiently handed on what they themselves had received.
To my students,
who continually reminded me that learning begins in wonder.
And to every creature through whom the Creator has quietly revealed His mercy. Above all,
to Christ,
whose Face in every icon longs to reveal.
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