Six new icons will soon watch over the Blessed Sacrament inside Brisbane’s Holy Spirit Provincial Seminary’s oratory as part of a new installation this year, reports The Catholic Leader.
The icons depict Mary, Mother of God, St John the Baptist, Sts Peter and Paul, St Mary Magdalene and St Mary of the Cross MacKillop.
The iconographer behind the brush is Sister of Mary Morning Star Josephine Marie, who has been working on this set since mid-October and is now living as an artist-in-residence on campus for the next six months as she completes the icons.
Sister of Mary Morning Star Josephine Marie is pictured writing an icon of St John the Baptist. PHOTO: Joe Higgins/Catholic Leader.
She will also hold training seminars for the seminarians on the basics of iconography.
Seminary rector Fr Neil Muir commissioned the icons after a discussion between seminary spiritual director Carmelite Father Paul Chandler and Sr Josephine Marie.
Fr Muir said many, if not most, of the seminarians grew up in parishes without icons.
By having icons at the seminary, just like they had Gregorian chant and Taizé, the seminary staff were equipping the seminarians to meet the needs of different Catholic communities and broaden their understanding of prayer, he said.
“We have a beautiful icon already in the (seminary) oratory of the Annunciation, and I’ll often spend time looking at that,” he said.
“You get drawn into the scene, but then you get drawn into prayer with Mary.”
He said the newly-commissioned icons would add to the sense of the Communion of Saints “with us in prayer”.
Fr Muir thanked the benefactors who made the icons possible and the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, and said there were ways for more people to contribute to the artworks and their installation in the oratory.
Sr Josephine Marie says the practices around icons come from “a beautiful truth about the incarnation of Jesus”.
“The heart of the icon is the incarnation,” she says.
“If Christ came as man, took on flesh, He became visible, then it can be represented, and we must represent Him in order to proclaim the incarnation.
“The honour that we show to an icon rises to its prototype and we are not at all venerating the wood or the gold.”
She says the icon is only significant in that it has been spiritualised to “help draw us to the one whom it depicts and through that to Christ”.
Sr Josephine Marie is excited for the future of iconography because there is a real sense of rediscovery of the practice within the Church today.
“In the daily life of many people, they get imagery hurled at them through so many forms of media, and it’s fast and it’s colourful and it’s furious and it’s a bit violent in some sense.
“So beauty, the beauty found in an icon is still.
“It slows us down and it helps us, as sacred music does, to take us into the life of faith.”
Sr Josephine Marie says she loves her time writing the icons and hopes the finished works draw the men discerning priestly life more deeply into the incarnational mystery of Christ and His priesthood.
She also hopes her time guiding the seminarians through iconography helps them when it comes time to make decisions about sacred art in the parishes they will serve.
This article is an abridged form of a feature article by Joe Higgins in The Catholic Leader. Read the full article here.