Joe Williams said he attended the noontime Mass one day at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist and heard a talk by Bishop Richard Lennon after Mass.
?He discussed the structure of the Church and how the Eastern churches enriched the Latin Church,? Williams said. He found the talk to be interesting and said it stuck with him for some time.
?I wanted him to have a connection to the Eastern churches,? Williams said, so he contacted Christ the Bridegroom Monastery in Burton, a Byzantine Catholic community of nuns in the Eastern Rite.
Sister Iliana, one of the nuns, is an iconographer so Williams commissioned her to create an icon for Bishop Lennon, who retired in late December as a result of ongoing health challenges.
?Bishop Lennon has a special devotion to St. Dominic and he requested that the icon be a painting of St. Dominic,? Williams said.
Sister Iliana spent about three months working on the piece, between other duties at the monastery.
?Icon work is a prayer; you?re in a spirit of prayer while making it,? Sister Iliana said. ?It?s the fruit of prayer and fasting.?
She talked to Bishop Lennon and asked him what prayer he would like included on his icon. He chose the Latin version of a Dominican motto: Contemplare et contemplata alliis tradere, which means to contemplate and to share the fruits of contemplation with others.
Sister Iliana said the prayer is painted onto the first layer of the icon, and then it is painted over with the muddy or chaos layer.
?No one sees the prayer,? she said.
Bishop Lennon?s painting is a traditional icon, painted with egg tempura, a mixture of egg yolk, water and vinegar, to which pigments are added. Colors range from dark to light and Sister Iliana said there is no shadowing. Gold leaf often is used on an icon.
?There is a gold background like the light from God,? she said, adding that icons are meant to be seen by candlelight.
?There?s a whole theology about icons,? Sister Iliana said. ?There are rules for every step. It?s not a creative art form
