Jacky Sewell will never forget the day she introduced a group of fourteen year-old boys from Pasifika, Māori and Pākehā churches to an image of Andrei Rublev's "Christ the Redeemer" icon. 

Rublev's 15th-century icon of Christ shows Jesus looking out from the remaining paint fragments left on the surface of its 600-year old wooden base, surrounded by signs of the former image's disintegration or removal. 

"I'll never forget what those boys said as they looked at that image...or the theology they wove." says Jacky. 

"They said the image of Christ was suffering, and that's just like Jesus was suffering."

"Then they said it's about us too. We suffer, and the Christ in us suffers too."

"They decided that little bits of Christ come through in us, just like the little bits of paint do on the wood. And we can only ever know little bits of his presence, but he is always there, watching.

Jacky didn't say a word. She just sat there listening – with her jaw dropping. 

For some time Jacky has used icons as a starting point for teaching pastoral ministry and spiritual formation, and she loves seeing an icon do its job - opening the eyes of the heart, opening a window onto spiritual reality, or acting as a conduit for prayer reaching beyond the painted image towards God. 

"An icon is only ever a glimpse into another reality. It can never be a complete glimpse of that reality, but it's a glimpse into some of that reality."

She loves the way that icons mess with our usual points of view, particularly inverse perspective. 

"Inverse perspective is critical. It's crucial to the icon. It’s not just us looking at the icon, the icon is also looking at us. In an icon the divine realm is reality, but we're not in that reality yet, we're in a glass darkly – as Paul says, 'For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face:...'

"So the perspective is backwards in some icons, because we're the ones who are far away while heaven is close. When you stop and get the hang of that, you just go wow! That's amazing. And suddenly the weirdness of icons begins to make sense" 

Jacky says that while we think of icons as small devotional objects for use in worship, in the Orthodox world churches are lined with icons on every wall and pillar and dome. They might be frescoes, paintings on wood, shaped metal, shell or inscribed on stone, but what they don't do is attempt to picture things as they are on earth. 

For example, the early Christian female martyr, Saint Theodosia is often depicted in icons that that don't show how she died. 

"These are holy portraits, and they are not intended to represent how a person was in life, but how that person is now, in the presence of Christ."

"So in this icon, the light that's reflected off her face is Christ's light, this is how she now looks in the company of heaven, transformed beyond all her sufferings." 

While icons and art more widely have always fascinated Jacky, there's a deeper connection for her to the Orthodox spirituality of icons, that she's known fully for only a few decades.

Icons connect her to the spiritual practices and her family identity of Orthodox Christianity linked to Orthodox churches in Russia and Greece, and the Holy Lands of Palestine, Israel and Egypt.

Born in England, and moving to Aotearoa as a child, Jacky never understood how deeply Orthodox spirituality ran through her family.

"We always knew we had a Russian Orthodox great grandmother, but not much more than that."

Now after years of piecing together the stories, Jacky has discovered that her great great-grandmother left Russia for Jerusalem with her children during the early 1880s. 

That's how her great grandmother on the Russian side ended up marrying into the Palestinian side of her family. Great granny Anna went on to marry Palestinian academic Selim Cobein, a Russian-Arabic translator, editor, poet and cousin to the first Arab Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Najeeb Cobein. Jacky’s Granny Masha was born in Nazareth and baptised in the Greek Orthodox Church of the Annunciation, and today some family members still live nearby.

When Selim, who was a pro-Arab activist during the 1916-18 Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire, printed "seditious literature" at the University of Jerusalem, both he and great Granny Anna, and their three children were exiled to Egypt, where Jacky's mother was born in Cairo. 

During the turmoil of the Second World War and the creation of the State of Israel, Jacky’s mother’s family became dislocated across Africa and eventually she and two sisters moved to the UK, marrying Englishmen. From there, Jacky's family later emigrated to New Zealand. 

But it wasn’t until 2008, when Jacky travelled to Russia and later to the Holy Lands with her own sons, that she felt the weightiness of her Russian - Palestinian Christian Orthodox heritage.

"I arrived in St Petersburg, dumped my bag in the hostel and went out to find the first Orthodox church that I saw. I walked in the door... and I found myself confronted with this huge icon of Theotokos (the mother of God) and I just burst into tears. And I think I stood there crying for nearly an hour."

Jacky felt like she'd come home. 

"Not in the sense of being in Russia, but in the sense of being enfleshed in an Orthodox worship setting. I had this deep feeling of,

"Why has it taken till I'm in my 50s, to discover this part of who I am?"

Later, in 2013 Jacky had the opportunity to make her way to the Holy Land.

"So I went on a personal pilgrimage. And I took both my sons and we went through Lebanon, Jordan, the Holy Lands and Egypt, and there we visited cousins in Nazareth who are still there." 

There's so much more Jacky could say about icons, and about her journey into her family's past and Orthodox spirituality, and over the next few months she'll be sharing some of that as she leads groups in different churches around Tamakai Makaurau Auckland on a journey of discovery into the world of icons and what they have to show us of God. 

But icons are not just a tool for prayer and reflection says Jacky, they are a window into a whole different way of thinking about and knowing theology.

"It's about understanding how something that looks slightly bizarre and primitive and weird actually reveals a completely different perception of the Divine."