Reflections on finding holiness in the city

As I walk among the streets and avenues of the city, cutting corners only on the quietest of streets, I notice all the still, captured faces looking at me. They come on printed out, taped up wallpapers, or else on flashing screens that startle me sometimes in the night. Most of them have text by their image, advertising their newest make-up or device, making them out to be improved, beautified, and perfected by something money can buy.

But I studied medieval history at school, and my favorite memories include my professor talking about icons of Mary and St. Christopher on practically every street corner. What were they advertising? Pictures like those depicted the people perfected, beatified, and impossibly transformed by something deep within their heart. They had texts too, like ΜΡΘΥ, advertising their names and titles, the reasons we know them to be holy. They were never printed out, never flashed with LCD-like intensity, but they were painted carefully, safeguarded under little wooden houses.

It’s not as if those medieval icons were useless. They might not point me to the best new deodorant, but didn’t their presence promise something else? I could have turned to the Theotokos for her intercession. To the giant St. Christopher I would look for protection as I traveled on my way.

They might have been reminders too. When I was angry, to be calmed. When I was stressed, to say a prayer. Rather than point to my financial struggle, the things I wished I had, they would remind me of the alms I could be giving to the beggars on the street.

And it was then, thinking about taped up posters and wished-for icons on city corners, that I thought about the other faces I was seeing. Walking by me, or lying on these corners, were living, flashing, or quite-still faces. Starting to look at them, I saw many things.

Some were no better than the ads and posters. They were still, stuck in some mire of depression, or else the whole person seemed a living advertisement, selling themselves off to anyone who’d look. Flashing clothes revealed hefty prices.

But some I saw, the ones I noticed also seeing. Their eyes mimicked the spiritual eyes, attentive to one thing only. And in them I saw who all should be, living advertisements for God’s Kingdom coming.

Published in the Urban Pilgrim, September 2024 edition.