Contemplating Icons as a Safe Space: Re-grounding the Self in the Sacred

Speaker: Rev’d Dr Joseph Balint Gabor

Wednesday 22nd February 6.00 – 8.30pm

Fee: £25 (to include supper)

Icons have hidden theological, spiritual, psychological, and moral images. They offer a powerful nourishment to the human interior.

Icon painting, properly called ‘iconography’, is writing of images. The icon painter ‘writes’ the icon, inscribing complex meanings into the image.

In a wider sense, everyone, who engages with the meaning of icons (understanding and applying their meaning on existential level) is an icon-writer. However, the icon also ‘writes us’. Icons narrate and re-narrate the story of our truer self. This being written by the sacred image through its rich layers of meaning can be ‘a healing encounter’.

EXPLORATIONS:

This is another of our ‘EXPLORATIONS’ series of Seminar Suppers. On arrival you will be greeted with a glass of wine or alternative and we will then hear from our speaker. After sharing a simple meal, there will be a hosted discussion and question and answer session, or similar, on the topic of the evening.

Joseph Balint Gabor is currently Minister in Charge at St Augustine, Grahame Park. A contextual theologian and former visiting lecturer at Heythrop College, his specialist fields are contemporary theology in the Catholic Tradition and dialogue with the psychoanalytic tradition through the work of Julia Kristeva. He has a keen interest in developing an ‘icono-therapy’, which extends beyond the theological mother narrative of Easter icons.