I am in love with icons of Robert Lentz.
Today I was looking for an icon of Isidore and Marie, husband and wife, patrons of farmers, which they were, and of parents who lose children, as they did. (Marie's feast is today -- appropriate as it seems so much like harvest, and too early.) I found his.
So -- have you noticed how marvelous the internet is? -- I looked him up. Oh! All my touchstones: Mary Magdalene. Theresa of Avila. Hildegard. Julian of Norwich. Even Dorothy Day!
But best of all I like the reinterpretations of traditional icons. I love fearless way he's stripped away convention to give living faces to Emmanuel the child Jesus, and The Good Shepherd. And I love the way he's tweaked it here and there, as in his Madre Dolorosa, the sorrowing mother, dressed in the white handkerchief of the Mothers of the Disappeared, and defaced with the white hand of the death squads.
These resonate so for me. His Eleusa (Compassionate) Madonna is surely the Lady of my "Night Litany." His Christ of Maryknoll is both a comfort and a challenge in a troubled world.
I admit the traditionalist in me (Eek, there's a traditionalist in me! Get it off, get it off!) is a bit thrown by seeing the halo bestowed on people who aren't, you know, saints. (Or even real -- there's one of Merlin, if you dig about.) This bothers me even in the case of Dorothy Day, and "canonize Dorothy Day" is top on my list of things to do when I get to be pope. (For that reason, I prefer this icon of her.) But I can get over that.
In fact, I'm over that. I'm going to dredge up an address and write this man a loving note. I hope humbly that at least one of my religious poems means as much to someone, someday, as one of these icons means to me.
Very neat images. I like their unexpectedness--the excellent cat with Julian of Norwich, St. Teresa with a tambourine (instead of being speared by an angel. Are these icons in the formal sense? I understand there are all kinds of rules and conventions attached to the painting of icons.