Day at the Museum!

Today for the first time, I got to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art...you know...where Rocky ran up the steps in the first Rocky movie. Why? Because all of my friends from Philadelphia have lived in Philadelphia their entire lives and never bothered going more than once (of course I lived in Tampa my whole life and never made it to Busch Gardens except maybe once in kindergarten).

There is a LARGE collection of European Church art at the museum. I'd call it baroque, or romantic, or Gothic but I honestly don't know much about art except to stand in front of a painting, stroke my chin, pretend to ponder, then say "hmm...intriguing..."

So the topic of icons/images/paintings in Church came up. Why do we Orthodox have them, need them, and want them in Church?

Off the top of my head I came up with two reasons:
1) In the Liturgy we stand in the presence of the whole Church, with the departed saints, and images help us remember so. I recall how the St. George Antiochian Church in Orlando (probably tons of others) had many small icons of saints behind their altar table. You wouldn't grasp that the Sacramental presence of the whole Church was there unless you had some guidance via images in front of your face during the Liturgy.
2) Having images of the saints adds to the experience of worship. I'm not sure if that is a true "mystical" experience of worship. However I'd like to think that just as we need chanting and hymns to condition our ears to the Liturgy, we also need our eyes to see things worthy of our awe and adoration.

Is it idolatry? No...I don't anyone in this day and age has ever "accidentally" worshipped an image before. If we know very well an image is exactly an image, then our hearts can't really be indicted for being so.

So if I like it...and you like it...let's get more and better icons in our Churches....nice ones at that!