You Can Turn Away. The Saints Remain.

I couldn’t tell you the first time I saw an Orthodox icon, or what it meant to me when I did. Somehow I was well into adulthood before I even realized that iconography was the word for that specific type of illustration that of course I’d seen here and there but which I’d only received purely passively, with zero appreciation. 

Later, as someone already curious about Orthodoxy, I do recall that my first conscious impressions of Byzantine iconography were that, like it or not, it was just something that was a part of the Tradition, and whether it was recognized as beautiful as some claimed or merely old-fashioned—which admittedly to me shares the same aesthetic space—I realized it had to be accepted.