https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FX-OQPtbsYQ
Icons are not snapshots. They’re not just someone who would come on an event and just take a picture of something that’s going on. Because all of these events are happening at different times and different places. The wise men were in the East when they saw the star. And when they arrived at the place where Christ was, it was like a year later, several months later. And then here’s the mother of God giving birth, but then here’s Christ here, and then here’s Christ here again being washed. And so what the icon does is it compresses things together. It takes these different elements of the story and it brings them into one place where you can see things in their meaning, you could say. How all these elements in the story come together and participate in the meaning. And so it can give us a different sense of what these things mean and how they come together. So what you see, for example, in the icon, you see it quite clearly. You see this joining of these kind of, you could say these wild opposites. You have these angels up above, right? You have this kind of demonic figure there below. You have these wise men who are from very, very far away and who are probably an elite nobles in the West. They were considered kings, we say the three wise kings. And so they’re the elite, but they’re also from far away. And then you have these homely shepherds who are just the guys next door who are participating in this event. And so look at how the icon is actually brought together. The whole thing is like a bullseye. It’s this concentric structure. You have something going on in the middle which brings together everything from everything that’s around it. And that already starts to tell us a little bit of the mystery of what it is that’s happening in that moment. What it is that’s going on? What is this Christ child? What is he for us? And the first thing that we can see is that he’s bringing together all these opposites. You could say something like he’s gathering together all of creation, all of everything, gathering it together into himself.