How do you recognize God? Alexander Filonenko, a Ukrainian philosopher, once shared a story about an exhibition dedicated to the New Martyrs, who were killed under the Soviet regime during the 20th century.
The people involved in preparing the exhibition discovered something surprising: the icons of the New Martyrs, painted from photographs taken shortly before their execution, failed to capture what the faces in the photographs so clearly expressed.
The icons didn’t do justice to the light in the eyes of those condemned to death. Usually, it’s the other way around: an icon captures the invisible light in a saint through exaggerated proportions, altered dimensions, and even reverse perspective.
Yet, something essential was missing from the icons that was clearly present in the physical faces of the martyrs.
How do you recognize a saint? By the halo? By an especially spiritual expression? By an elongated figure reaching toward heaven? Or by something elusive, something that cannot quite be grasped, since outwardly a saint looks just like everyone else — except for a strange yet irresistible flicker in their eyes.
This is what Antonello da Messina, an early Renaissance painter from Italy, must have sensed when he depicted Mary, Jesus, and the saints in a strikingly realistic manner, contrary to the conventions of his time. Saints were traditionally portrayed with halos above their heads.
Yet when we see them in the middle of the street, we see no halos. We see their eyes. Antonello da Messina made the eyes the focal point of his paintings. He sought to show not how different Jesus and Mary were from us, but how strikingly similar they were.
They could have been anyone we meet on the street. What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us. Just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home…
After all, didn’t God become one of us so we can become like Him?
Recognition of God is always a matter of capturing something elusive that shines through a person’s ordinary features.
God wants to become like us so that we may become like Him.
When we fail to recognize Him in a stranger on the bus, we fail to recognize Him at all.
There is nothing extraordinary about God — unless we recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. We can only grasp how unlike us God is by first recognizing how much He is like us. We can only appreciate His transcendence when we discover His immanence.
Only when we recognize how intimately approachable He became can we begin to see how infinitely unapproachable He remains.
God cannot be recognized as God unless He is first recognized as man.
After all, the Roman soldier who looked at Jesus on the cross didn’t see any halos. He saw something else and said:
“Truly this man was the Son of God.”
Explore the connection between Beauty and recognizing God in my book:
