Beyond the Painted Board (The Icon-writer as an Icon himself)

I am an Icon. I am an image of the miracle called life. I did not know when I will be born nor will I ever come into being at all. I did not pre-select through whose union I’ll be brought about into life. From the millions of possibilities, I came to be.

My world is an Icon. Though I cannot anymore remember when I first caught sight of light, everything just gradually, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, revealed itself to me. What at first appeared to me but a succession of unrelated hues and blobs and shapes, what in the beginning seemed to me but a train of incomprehensible buzz and echoes of strange sounds and stirrings, what then felt as a variety of unknown sensations and textures: all these morphed into images and sounds and a complex combination of any two or three or all of them that now define what I come to know of myself, my relationships, my environment.

My life journey is an Icon. The way I think, relate and react, the choices I make on when to speak out or remain silent, what urges me to do something or keep still, that which fires me up into burning passions or hurls me down into cold disaffection, my proud moments of accomplishments and the humbling instances of my misjudgments and failures, the decisions I make of where to invest my capacity to love as well as what to choose to ignore and let go, my acceptances and rejections, that on-going, inner discernment I have to grapple with as to when to be receptive of the others’ loves and when to be wary of them, of sifting through truths and lies: these comprise the dynamic and yet to be finished Icon of this pilgrimage called my life. This is my life’s Icon as a work-in-progress. Many more “learnings” are yet to be learned, many more mistakes corrected and unlearned. My life is an Icon that remains open to developments that are yet to unfold.

I am an Icon. I am an image of the miracle called life. I fully participate in my Icon's creation while at the same time concede of not being its true iconographer; that in the whole enterprise of writing the Icon of my life, I am but a collaborator from whom is required a generous “emulsion” of faith, humility, docility, simplicity and charity, so that the desired outcome may truly be revealed.

I am an Icon, an image of the miracle called life. An Icon that is yet to be fully accomplished, an Icon awaiting its completion. God is my Iconographer. With hope I anticipate, while I continue to struggle to constantly cooperate in its making, the perfection of this Divine Iconography of the Eternal Iconographer Himself. I am a still-being-written Icon of God.