My dear friends, these days we are under assault, and the enemy is fierce. They are everywhere. No matter how hard we may try, they have managed to infiltrate our work, play, homes, children, and even church. And not only are they everywhere, they continue to strike us with a forthright intensity and overwhelmingly irresistible power that would crush our very wills if possible. What is more insidious is their ability to morph into something that is so familiar and accepted by all of us that we don’t even realize the extent to which they have taken over. The militant penetration into our lives is so profound that their own essence has become part of the very fabric of our beings so that their sudden removal causes us unbelievable pain and distress.

Do you recognize this foe? If not, you should step back, find a quiet and relatively unadorned room somewhere, and simply try to sit there, silently, for, let’s say, 15 minutes. For an additional test, count how long it takes before your mind begins to completely wonder about the many things you should be doing or about your plans for the rest of the day. The point is that your mind is addicted, and not just a mild case, but a severely debilitating one. It can’t rest. It seeks fulfillment of its deepest need, and no matter how hard you try to discipline it, the fact is that it won’t rest. There is no sense of relaxation or quietude. Struggling against this only seems to make it worse. After all, how do you think your mind into quiet? Doesn’t the mere fact of thinking agitate the very organ you’re trying to convey it to hush up? What about the spiritual impulses that actually govern the mind? Is it possible that this enemy has seduced our very spiritual selves, too?

If you haven’t figured out who this all-prevalent enemy is yet, I will clue you in. It’s called imagery. Really? You might say. Well, without a doubt, this is the single biggest invader into the lives of all human beings in the last 100 years. In the last 20, the speed of the invasion has only increased, as imagery has moved from its battle plan of conquest to one of colonization. And what is worse, it has for the most part seduced and drugged all of us so that it is beyond our comprehension to ever again live without it. It is the ultimate Stockholm syndrome. The brave new world it promises has entered into the human experience with a breathless alacrity that no one has been able to resist. Want to seek some respite from it? Well, good luck. The 15-minute silence experiment should be proof enough. In fact, you could argue that the visual silence that was once so important to the human race now seems to many as madness. What in the world has happened, and shouldn’t we just go with it?

Reflect for a moment if you will. We are bombarded by images of all types nearly every waking moment of the day: a plethora of visual stimuli that hits us so quickly that it is almost beyond measurement. This vast array of imagery actually is something that has given us the modern term—usually one of approbation—“multitasking.” The reason for this is because of the various and sundry devices that allow us to process many different images from multiple directions and often in multiple forms: tablets, phones, watches, computers, gaming machines, televisions, and let’s not forget the purely aural devices that add to the stew, complemented by the more traditional venues of advertisements on billboards, signs, magazines, and even junk mail. Well, you get the idea.

It can be argued that human beings were never meant to process such an overload of sensory stimuli. The outcome of this visual flood is that our minds and spirits are constantly seeking to filter the important from the unimportant in order to give the necessary attention to those items which are the most pressing or needful. In many cases, we fail to do this, and only a cursory glance of attention is accorded these many different gremlins vying for our consideration. The whole process dulls our minds, makes decisions more difficult, overstimulates the brain, and makes any chance of quiet, reflection, and stillness virtually impossible. It could even make church more difficult.

How is this so? We have become so jam-packed with pent-up dynamism and unreleased mental energy that an outlet has to be found. It is no coincidence that many of the fastest-growing churches in the world are those which are becoming more and more difficult to discern from many of the common elements that seek our attraction in the world. From churches that look like coffee shops and offer as many java-oriented choices, too, to mega-complexes with services more akin to rock concerts, complete with multiplex theater screens, light shows, and all the appurtenances found—and maybe even more—in most modern theaters. This offering by these churches is quite intentional. They know, through polls and surveys, exactly what brings in the crowd, and they know that they are competing with the things found in the world today that often supplant any idea of going to church.

A sign on the highway near where I live says, “Church for people that don’t do church,” and that says it all. Let’s forget any idea of your parents’ traditional Sunday commitment to pure prayer and worship and focus more on what we feel that we need, allowing for the fact that our good God will make adjustments to his schedule and plans for us precisely because he wants us to be happy. This sort of attitude makes it more difficult for the Orthodox Church to attract potential converts. Steeped in 2,000 years of a spiritual legacy that not only proclaims how we worship God but the necessity of worshiping him in a certain manner, that puts him first and our desires second, and insists with some degree of vehemence that church is a place of community and divestiture of self for the sake of that community, Orthodoxy sticks to its guns as the way of worship.

Even so, our brains continue to crave this stimulation. Yet we can’t get around the fact that our ways of worship are also a product of time long ago and a land far away, and that the establishment of the tried-and-very-true ways of approaching the Creator not only spring from a certain mode of existence, but in many ways demand that we pare down an awful lot of what we now view as our normal way of life in order to fully appreciate and enter into the totality of the grace offered us.

Let’s take an example of something very common to all of us, since we are talking about images in general. I have already mentioned that much of our life experiences are often under-appreciated because we don’t have time, inclination, or more probably ability to give due consideration to many important events. For instance, if you happened to live in the Dutch 1600s, any painting by Rembrandt would cause a tremendous stir. The quality of the painting, the life-likeness of the subjects, the vividness with which the painter caresses the canvas, and the extraordinary communicativeness of the artist is something that would be immediately apprehended by even the lesser informed people on the street. Something as special as that image would grip them and move them in a way we simply don’t experience today, except for experts and connoisseurs.

The reason is simple. They were not as encumbered by the imagery assault that all of us undergo in our age by a magnitude of millions. That’s right: aside from the normal sights of life, like sky, tree, roads, etc., that we see every day, it is highly likely that within the span of only one day, we are subjected to more special imagery than people in Rembrandt’s day knew in the course of a year or two. It’s that bad, or good, I guess, depending on your viewpoint, but our saturation levels in the imagery ingest is far greater than our ancestors knew. And with superabundance also comes saturation, which lessens the impact of any one particular image, no matter how special.

As Robert Hughes, the late art critic of Time magazine once said, “It’s like an intrusion into paradise.” Think of it: a painting is meant to be viewed without distraction, without competing images beckoning away our attention. The eye needs time to consider and absorb. Even at a painting from the period of the Dutch master, there is much for the eye to take in and process. Only after the viewing the component parts is the brain able to process all the information the eyes have seen and form an emotional reaction and intellectual assessment.

If we skip back many more years, to the beginnings of Christianity itself and the initial icons created by the Church, we can begin to understand how effective these images were for the establishment of the faith. At that period of time, an icon would demand attention of the highest quality, rapt and gripping, and the power of the images were able to penetrate the most hardened of souls because they were able to exercise their grace in an environment where there was no competition. The airways were clear and the media nonexistent, or at least far less demanding and insistent.

Even today, many Orthodox are deprived of the opportunity of really perceiving the power of an icon because of our flooded sensory channels. We’ve lost the ability to concentrate even in our prayer activities. The image invites, but the RSVP is often neglected because we find it a struggle to focus. Even an icon finds it hard to fit in our world of complex and multi-present imagery.

In our lives today, we have also taken advantage of the opportunity for imagery creation in a manner that the earliest iconographers never considered or dreamed of. Today the creators of these works of faith are only one segment of a much larger chain. Thanks to duplication methods of all types, even these sacred pieces of art and communication from heaven can be and indeed are mass-produced, sometimes for good and other times debatably questionable. You can now go to any number of Orthodox bookstores or websites and obtain finely set copies of some of the most famous and venerated icons in the world, for home and church use. In olden days, it was quite unknown for any one family, or even monk or nun in his or her cell, to have as many icons as often grace the home icon corner. Even St. Seraphim had only one: the Mother of God. But for those who wish to shell out the bucks, and often that can be expensive but at the same time quite reasonable, 40, 50, or more icons is not unusual.

This can prove distracting to even those who will not readily admit to it. Now, this is not to suggest some kind of hidden iconoclasm in limiting the number of icons one has, only to hint that in our modern age we might be acting in a subliminal way by satisfying our forced need for more and more imagery. Of course, many, many churches are covered with icons, top to bottom, and this is a good thing. In church, we want to be surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses in the context of the worshiping community. But even there, I’ve had people tell me they often get distracted.

But what about other media? It is easy to print off icons from the internet with a color printer, and even use them in church, which is what many missions, including the one I pastor, do on occasion. Church bulletins sometimes print them copiously. How do we dispose of them? Throw them away, usually, but we certainly would not do that to a painted icon, so is this an impious act? Is it possible to create an icon of an icon, and how many times removed from the original before we can dispose of it guilt-free?

Today many churches send out those little 2"x3” laminated icons for all sorts of reasons and occasions. Pastors give them out, they are sent with requests for donations for foundations and churches, and almost any occasion will suffice for including a small icon. And they can’t be easily destroyed because many of them, of course, are laminated. Should we just toss them? As an aside, they do make great bookmarks, but only religious books, of course.

The point is that the image explosion continues as we borrow the techniques from the modern world and apply them as a facet of our faith practices perhaps without really thinking about the wisdom of such efforts. I have in my home a stack of some 30 icons like the ones I just mentioned. I cannot bring myself to throw them out, even though there is rarely a use for them. How should they be treated? And again, how do you create sufficient criteria for their removal? Are there some icons that can simply be trashed without a second thought? Adding to the difficulty is the very real issue of paper icons that gush myrrh and work miracles. One noted iconographer has opined that any copies that are not painted originals cannot truly be considered icons. Yet it would seem that God is not giving us the easy way out here with this cut-and-dried opinion, and through his grace is able to work grace to his people, showing us that any image of him and his saints deserves at least a modicum of respect.

The question remains as to whether these mass-media creations can and should be treated in the same way that those images produced through the centuries-old and time-honored tradition are. And the comment must be made about the increasing use of electronic devices in the church. It is now not uncommon for large LED screens to be present to encourage singing in some congregations, or for clergy and those at the klēros to use phones and tablets for service texts. While an informed and judicious use of the devices can be welcome, it is a little disconcerting to see them laid near the holy table or even on the holy table. After all, everything there is supposed to be made holy, set apart, and dedicated for that use only. Can such a multitasking device be said to be dedicated to a sacred use only? Will we put crosses on our iPhones and kiss them when we are finished with them?

This is not a criticism, but it is a call for some serious reflection on the nature of the holy, before we begin wholesale to simply assume that our use of these devices is proper. Technology has indeed invaded the church, and its implications are far-reaching. The danger is that we will make some assumptions and incorporate them into our practices long before we have really given the whole issue the thought and prayer that it deserves.

Several things are for certain. We must understand and recognize the dilution of our senses and spirits by the influx of imagery we receive every day, much of it hostile to our spiritual lives, even though we might not be aware of it. And we must renew our sense of the sacred when encountering the fruits of this easy imagery, always conscious of the fact that a laissez-faire attitude to sacred things inevitably implodes upon us. We begin to desacralize those things that by nature are sacred, and icons in particular are rendered holy by the image of that which they portray. There are no easy answers, and I won’t pretend to have anything but opinions at the moment. But our interaction with this sensory overload is definitely something that affects our spirits, bodies, and attitude towards God. May his wisdom descend upon us all and grant us answers to the problems that the modern world will no doubt continue to thrust upon us. And may God bless each and every one of you.