SOUL FOOD:Slide show, icons at Getty’s Vespers service

From PowerPoint projections to Sony JumboTron broadcasts, audio-visuals are stock-in-trade for many 21st-century Christian congregations. Not so much for Eastern Orthodox churches, which by design continue to worship according to a rich tradition handed down from the earliest Christian times.

So imagine my surprise when a slideshow prefaced the Triumph of Orthodoxy Vespers service that I attended at the Getty Center’s Harold M. Williams auditorium. It was trumped only by my initial surprise that a secular cultural center was hosting the Triumph of Orthodoxy Vespers at all.

The occasion commemorates the defeat of Byzantine iconoclasm, which had twice in the course of a hundred years banned the use of icons -- holy images -- as a form of idolatry.

So the feast called The Triumph of Orthodoxy has been celebrated on the first Sunday in Lent for nearly 12 centuries, since the Empress Theodora restored icons to the church by proclamation in 843. The Vespers, evening prayers, are said the Saturday before it.

The slide montage wasn’t, of course, part of the actual Vespers — the highly ordered and traditional Orthodox prayers. And there was no organ intoning solemnly, no praise band rocking in the background.

Yet still, while early comers waited for the 450-seat auditorium to fill, photos of the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine and Sinai illuminated a bare white wall where, in a church building, the icon-adorned apse would be. The images helped to set the stage and pass the time.

The ancient stone monastery, golden in the desert light, dwarfed against the second-highest mountain in the Sinai Peninsula. Black-robed monks leading pilgrims up its steep, sand-colored steps. Monks at worship. Monks at study. Monks about their daily tasks.

Atop a pale copula on the monastery’s roof, an intricate, wrought iron cross echoes the form of an ornate gold cross standing against the wall of the evening’s makeshift sanctuary. Two crosses, 8,000 miles apart, brought together by one faith.

Earlier, in the parking lot and on the tram ride up the hillside to the Getty Center, strangers had glanced at each other, smiled and nodded. Companions whispered.

The hush evoked the historic nature of what was about to take place: A celebration of the restoration of icons to the church in the presence of some of the oldest surviving icons in the world. Not at Sinai, but in Los Angeles.

The Getty Center had divined to bring six manuscripts, 43 icons and four other artifacts used in worship from the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine to Los Angeles for a public exhibit. And so, late last year it did.

The endeavor, which the Getty considers one of its most ambitious, required the cooperation of both the monastery and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. Yet it succeeded.

The exhibit, “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai,” opened Nov. 14, 2006 and closed last Sunday. Who would have guessed it would draw visitors in record-breaking numbers?

Though by some accounts the Eastern Orthodox Church has a rapidly growing presence in the United States, its adherents are still a small fraction among Christians here. The church’s ancient faith and practices are largely unknown.

Yet tens of thousands — by the close of the exhibit, perhaps hundreds of thousands — came to see the holy images brought to Los Angeles from Sinai. Kristen M. Collins, assistant curator of manuscripts at the J. Paul Getty Museum and co-editor of the catalog for the exhibit, speaking before the Vespers, said some visitors came to see the icons “for their extraordinary beauty” while others came “as a spiritual pilgrimage.”

The Vespers, which was necessarily a ticketed event, sold out. Hundreds who did not have a ticket stood outside.

In many ways, though, it was like any other Vespers for the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The same prayers were said — this night in English — in the same order they have always been said anywhere. It lasted about two hours and concluded with a procession with icons.

This time, though, the procession was not around a church. It snaked instead from the Getty auditorium through the museum’s entrance hall to an outdoor stage in the courtyard alongside the exhibitions pavilion.

It was hard to forget and amazing to remember this holy event was being carried out in a very public place.

John and Toeaso Ma’ae, members of St. Barnabas Antiochian Orthodox Church in Costa Mesa, were there with their children, ages 6, 4 and 14 months. John said he was “floored” when he heard the Getty had offered to have the Triumph of Orthodoxy Vespers there.

Albanian, Antiochian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian and Ukrainian Orthodox — even some who were not Orthodox at all — the Getty had brought them together for Vespers in this place. Apart from a sprinkling of nuns in their black garb and a lot of children, the crowd resembled one that might be found in the lobby of most any Los Angeles theater.

The Rt. Rev. Maxim, Bishop of the Western American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox church presided and gave a homily titled, “Holy Icons and the Ultimate State of Being.” Icons, he explained, were made possible through “the Incarnation [in Jesus Christ] of the Invisible God.”

They are, he told his audience, “our spiritual treasures because they ultimately reveal our relationship with God; that we belong, not to our self, or to our work, or to ambition in this world, but that we belong to God…. They reveal that we are not alone, not isolated, but part of a communion of saints, loved by God with a love which this world with all its adversities and all of its trials and tribulations cannot take away.”

More than a dozen priests gathered around an icon of Christ and before an image of an icon of the Annunciation, projected larger than life onto the wall behind them. They held icons and passed microphones to take turns saying prayers.

Archpriest Michael J. Lewis from St. Luke Orthodox Church in Garden Grove was among them. It was, he said, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pray before the holy icons from St. Catherine’s Monastery.”

These oldest of icons, he said, are “filled with the prayers of the thousands of Christians, venerable monastics and pilgrims from all nations, who have worshiped God before them for centuries…. They radiate the grace of the Holy Spirit like some gracious cloud within which we were blessed to stand, if only for a short while.”

The Getty Center not only brought them here; it invited the faithful to pray in the presence of them.