Icons

A friend visited us this week and we took her to several of our favorite places, including Marshall Point Light. We seem to get here at least once a summer and never tire of it, rather like supplicants bowing every Sunday to a panel portrait of St. Peter.

There are of course different kinds of icons. The man-made ones can be glorious like the Light, but often I think that the humble and the simple and the natural compete quite well. A human arranged these stones and a shell on the beach, a slight attempt to improve on nature:

But a more random, less intrusive, arrangement may be just as beautiful:

But surrounding the Light and the lighthouse, next to the small fragile cairns we build and the tide knocks down, there's the rock, the real St. Peter, about which we can do nothing but marvel. Upon this I will build my own church.