Crombie returned to Michigan and put her newfound skills to good use. She was on the steering committee for the Archdiocese of Detroit’s Women’s Conference in the early 2000s, and when the event moved to the Macomb Community College Fieldhouse, the conference needed a large cross to fit the space for Mass.
“We needed this huge, huge cross, but there wasn’t one available,” Crombie said. “I said to the steering committee, ‘I can do it.’ I don’t know if I want it, I don’t know if God wants it, but if you want it, I can do an icon. What emerged was a 14-foot cross my friend made, and I did this 6-foot-5 Jesus icon that we mounted on the cross.
“The work was magnificent, and I can say that because in iconography, God is the artist,” Crombie added. “I just mix the paint and hold the brush. An iconographer doesn’t sign the work because it is God’s; it’s not yours.”
The 6-foot-5 icon now resides in the offices of Father John Riccardo’s ACTS XXIX ministry.
Being able to draw such an icon after completing only two others at a workshop shows how God is always in control in the iconography process, from discerning whether an icon should be created to planning out how it will look, Crombie said.
“God is in control, always,” Crombie said. “It’s always his will. I learned that God works through you if you open yourself to him. I know that for a fact. I look at certain icons in particular and stand back and go, ‘I know I was part of that, but I didn’t do that.’ I don’t know how to describe it otherwise; it is knowing that God did that, and no one could tell me differently.”
Iconographers see themselves as instruments of God’s will, Crombie said. In order to complete an icon — or even start an icon — everything must be done in prayer, Crombie said.
“The icon begins in prayer, stays in prayer, and ends in prayer,” Crombie said. “I’m not one of the old monks in the monastery who does this 24/7, but it is a product of prayer and whether or not God wants an icon. So when someone commissions me, I tell them I’ll pray. I’ll pray for a couple of weeks to confirm whether or not God wants this. And most of the time he does; there have only been a couple of times where he said no or maybe, but not right now. And the people have been understanding and agreeable with it. So we are praying for God’s will.”
Icons have more of a tradition in the Eastern Church, with the faithful able to recognize saints and holy people through the usage of symbols, colors, and placements of different elements of the icon on the canvas.
Icons are less like stained-glass windows, which depict saints and various moments in salvation history, and more like testaments to the constant presence that saints have in the Church, Crombie said.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
“In the Eastern Church, to go before an icon means to be in front of that individual, one-on-one. They use the image liturgically, somewhat differently than the Roman Catholic Church,” Crombie said. “When you go to an Orthodox Church, you will see icons everywhere; you see them in their liturgy. It’s how they show the divine. We can use a camera show how a person looks, an artist can draw how they perceive a person, but when we see a person through God’s eyes, that’s an icon. So they might have longer fingers, elongated faces, depending on the icon and where it’s from and the person it depicts.”
Two of Crombie’s favorite commissioned icons are at the Divine Mercy Center in Clinton Township, Michigan: Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Image of Divine Mercy.
Crombie’s relationship with the Divine Mercy Center, the Servants of Jesus the Divine Mercy, and its foundress Catherine Lanni began during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
The two women didn’t know each other before the trip but connected after hearing a talk from Rwandan holocaust survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza. The group was standing at the foot of Mount Tabor in Israel, where Ilibagiza said Our Lady of Kibeho is her favorite devotion.
“She was talking about this devotion, and I was walking away thinking, ‘Maybe Our Lady is calling me to write an icon of Our Lady of Kibeho that’s life-sized,’” Crombie said. “She and I were praying that, and we prayed for a year about this. It was getting frustrating because I wanted to hear the Lord say yes, and we were hearing nothing.”
Credit: Source link
