In Praise of Holy Women

– the seed of the Church; the Holy Spirit hovering over the Mother of God
and the Apostles in the upper room – the birth of the Church; the Bride of
Christ, the Jerusalem from above, the Holy City descending and hovering
over a ‘field’ of crosses – the culmination or ‘marriage’ of a Church that does
not forget but remembers. And again from the book of Revelation: the four
horsemen of the apocalypse and the ‘bowls of wrath’ poured onto the earth
after the opening of the seven seals and the 144,000 redeemed – all trials,
tribulation and sanctification of the Church that lives in the world but is not
of it. Like high-speed photographic images, some of this action seems to be
caught at a fraction of a second, but unlike the photographic images, the
action is not ‘frozen’, for these images combine all three temporal frames
of reference at once – past, present and future – confusing and suspending
time in a continuum of extra-temporality. All this is seemingly done ‘hastily’,
without much attention to detail since the images were to be viewed in the
flicker of candlelight, so that their forms and colours would vibrate gently,
almost imperceptibly, as though the persons depicted were living, breathing.
Later, an acquaintance of Sister Joanna upon encountering her work, wrote: ‘
…it seemed her icons were painted by the Spirit, in one breath – irrepressibly,
as if in a hurry, without painstaking attention to detail or evenness of line –
yet precisely, vulnerable to risk and in full trust of God.’ 38
Only two ‘traditional’ icons are included in the ensemble: the one of Christ
calling the Church to Unity (John 17), and the other of the Mother of God,
(see front cover) the ‘Throne’ of God without whose consent there would be
no Church – the ‘holy ground’ for whom the incarnate Godmanchild takes
off his sandals as did Moses who shed his footwear before the Burning Bush
(Exodus 3:5) – which itself is a ‘type’ of the Blessed Virgin, for she bore in her
womb the divine fire and, like the Burning Bush, was not consumed. While
the Western eye might see a portrait of mother and child, the trained eye
of the Eastern Church will contemplate the rich symbolism that amounts
to nothing less than an assured covenant of fellowship and communion
between heaven and earth.
On the subject of this icon, we can see a general principle – so vital in
Reitlinger’s work – the degree of interpersonal communion. She achieves
this, as do most accomplished iconographers, with the use of slightly
enlarged eyes, the coalescence of the nimbuses of the two subjects and the
priestly hand of the Godmanchild set in blessing over his mother’s heart.
Sister Joanna then uses the mother’s clothing to enfold the child protectively,
but at the same time the clothing opens out in the form of an upended
arch to ‘relate’ him to the viewer; in other words, she is protective but not
possessive. Hence, while the two do not make direct eye contact, they are
still in a limitless interpersonal exchange in which the viewer is invited to
38
Erokhina, Olga, About Sister Joanna, in The Wise Sky, op cit, 29; in BOUL, 469
31