Icons are the sacred images of Christ, His Mother, and the saints that fill Orthodox churches and homes. They are not worshipped, worship belongs to God alone, but venerated: honoured with reverence that passes, as the Fathers say, to the one whom the image depicts. To kiss an icon of Christ is to reach, through the image, toward Christ Himself.
The Church's confession of icons rests on the Incarnation. Because the invisible God became visible in the flesh in Jesus Christ, He can be depicted; to deny the icon is, in the end, to deny that God truly became man. This was settled at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, after long struggle, and is celebrated each year on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.
An icon is written, not merely painted, a theology in line and colour, following the tradition rather than the artist's imagination. It is a window through which the light of the Kingdom shines, and a witness that the saints depicted are not dead but alive in Christ, and near.