Icons are found throughout all the churches of the East. They are venerated (honoured), but not worshipped. The reverence shown to an icon is not to the artwork itself, but to the person or event it portrays. The icon is never an object of worship in itself.

The word ‘Icon’ comes from the Greek eikon, an ‘image’—human beings are made in the image of God (Genesis 1.27), Christ is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15). An icon is a window into the spiritual world, not an artistic device: it helps us to contemplate spiritual matters, to put us into a prayerful frame of mind, to remind us of events in the Bible, the life of Christ and the Saints. Icons are the Christian faith in visual form, and a sign of the transfigured cosmos. The Incarnation (God’s becoming fully human in Christ) means that God is truly accessible and describable.

The art of making Orthodox icons follows certain symbolism that carries a meaningful message. For example, the eyes and ears on a figure in an icon are disproportionately large, because a spiritual person spends time listening to God’s word and seeking to do God’s will. On the other hand, the mouth, which can be the source of empty or harmful words, is small.

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