SISTER ANNA — Anglican Solitary, scholar, teacher, knitting designer, author, professor, Sister Anna writes, “God’s love raises our mundane and tragic lives to something amazing and wonderful, worthy of thanks and praise.”

“Icons are a special form of art that does not look for something new and different, but for the eternal, imaged in the temporal. One has to look slowly at an icon, carefully . . . one must have the eyes to see through the representation in the picture to the spiritual meaning behind it. Thus, ‘reading’ an icon is like reading any Scripture: it opens a truth to the soul. So an icon asks a viewer to spend some time with it — and listen to what it says.”

—Sister Anna

Now there is this book. It is a big book. That means, first of all, that it is not one to be picked up, glanced at, and put onto a shelf with many others. It is a book to be put in a public place where passersby can look into it or pore over it while waiting for the next thing to happen. In short, it is a picture book. But even as a picture book it is highly unusual. So many, so very many, of the pictures seem to be the same.

Many are icons of the Nativity. Icons are a special form of art that does not look for something new and different, but for the eternal, imaged in the temporal. One has to look slowly at an icon, carefully. We are told that icons are ‘written,’ not ‘drawn.’ I suppose this is because every part of the picture has a meaning, every gesture an understandable significance, and one must know what these meanings are in order to understand what the icon is about.

But it is possible that one must also have another kind of literacy to fully grasp what one is seeing: one must have the eyes to see through the representation in the picture to the spiritual meaning behind it. Thus, ‘reading’ an icon is like reading any Scripture: it opens a truth to the soul. So an icon asks a viewer to spend some time with it — and listen to what it says.

Churches are so full of icons, of innumerable works of reverential art that individual pieces are overlooked. They are unseen from being in full sight, or from being hidden amid a collection of many, or behind others that are larger or brighter, or forgotten from a past time, or hiding in an unlit corner. The Search finds these things, brings them forward, lights them with their deserved radiance, and polishes their true colors. The passer-by, then, is invited to stop, to see the one picture among so many that calls out personally with a message of transcendence.

This is not only a picture book. It is a trove of information; each picture carries its story of where and when it came into the world. Your eye stops at one picture, one icon, and underneath it you can find when it was written and where, even by whom if it is known, and where it now resides. There is a wealth of history here. And it is not only the history of individual artifacts, it is the history of a Church that began so many hundreds of years ago, that has flourished in different times and places, has also waned and grown again. Centered in Jerusalem, moving outward to Byzantium, then following the fortunes of peoples and nations. This Church came into the Western Hemisphere through Alaska and has spread, through time, throughout the United States. So it is fitting that this journey is memorialized here in the visual record of the churches and the stories of their people. In our present time, though the Church has been relegated to a small place in so many people’s lives, it shows signs of growing again, a growth imaged here in new iconography that leans toward more modern and separately ethnic sensibilities, while it still holds to its original intent of pointing to the eternal.

A book of glorious pictures. A history of the human search for the transcendent in the midst of the temporal. The Search is also a story book. Telling stories is something that humans do to create meanings. Without them we just have chronicles, lists of facts, or images, or ideas. When these things are shaped into stories, they become meaningful to one who encounters them. So this book is a book full of stories. There are many individual stories of people whose lives are shaped by the churches where they worship. Through them the temporal and the transcendent come together just as clearly as in the icons of the Nativity. The stories are varied and multi-faceted as life itself, lived under the over-arching presence of the Eternal.

Finally, this book ends with the Stations of the Cross. There could be nothing more fitting than that a story begun with the birth of a child should end with his death. There is not one without the other, and Christ is called the Alpha and Omega. But the Cross is more than that. It is the seed that drops into the ground in order to bring forth much fruit. The death of the One Whose Nativity was sought became, in his death, the birth of the Church.

There are many facets of the Church, many ways to see it through time and place. For the most part, it is studied as history, seen more as a part of temporal politics than as a reflection of the eternal. The Search looks more through the prism of transcendence. It takes us through time and around the globe, bringing forth innumerable objects, large and small, modest and flamboyant to show forth the human vision of the divine. All of this wealth of matter is cherished and enlivened by people, all the people that we meet through all these pages, the people who are the Church, the body of Christ.

Alexis Xenakis is a modern Everyman. He is practical, hardworking, imaginative and enthusiastic. He has always been willing to try new things with his motto for every new undertaking being, “How hard can it be?” He is a man of action; there is always more. More possibilities, more beauty, more accomplishments.

The child-like desire for more becomes, as life goes on, a spiritual yearning, a yearning for the transcendent. For the last ten years Alexis has embodied this passion in a search for the Nativity. It has been a search to record that vision of transcendence that is realized in the icons of Mary with the Christ Child.

Why the Nativity? If you ask him, he will tell you that it comes out of his heritage in the Eastern Orthodox Church; that he can use his most personal and effective medium, the camera; that choosing the Nativity narrowed the search and the icons are ubiquitous and beautiful.

All this is true, but I believe there is another reason: at the Nativity, God appears first to parents, then to shepherds, then to kings, as a baby. A baby brings love into the world. The Gospel of John tells us, “God is love.”

It is that love which raises our mundane and often tragic lives to something amazing and wonderful, worthy of thanks and praise. To search for the Nativity is to search for that same joyful mystery.

When Alexis set off on his pilgrimage it took him to many places, many more places than he thought of or imagined. And he took innumerable and wonderful pictures, many of which appear in this book which is a record of years of pilgrimage and hard work.

On his way he met everyday people. But they were all people who shone with an inner light, with the light of Christ. Alexis spoke with them, heard their stories and has recorded many here. So his journey through glorious images of the Nativity, of God the Baby, opened him to the discovery of the transcendent in the faith of the people he met.

He was turned once again to the love of neighbor blossoming from the love of God. This is the substance of this book. It has informed, elevated and transfigured Alexis’ life and work — his Search.

— Sister Anna