The meaning of icons
Certainly, it would be very difficult to understand the sprit of the Russian Orthodox Church or any other Orthodox Christian community without understanding the meaning of the icons.
People sometimes ask if the Orthodox Christians worship Icons. The answer is simple, it is an emphatic No!
The word "Icon" means a picture or image. In simple terms an Icon of Christ is a picture of Christ which tells everyone that God became a man. No Christian worships an image. Christians worship God. We do not worship Icons, but we do venerate them. That means we show special respect for the Icons. We do this because the Icons are a way of joining us to the goodness and holiness of God and His Saints.
In fact, there is a much more down-to-earth and less theological significance of the icons and that could be brought home just in the ordinary human experience of having photographs around in one's home. When we are away from home, or separated from the people that we love, we very often have their photographs around us. We have them there to remind us of them and in some way they can make us feel more in touch, more in communion with them. And for Orthodox Christians icons of Christ, His Mother Mary, the saints are like family photographs, the icons around the walls of the church are there not only to be venerated, not only to act as visual aids, or teaching aids, but they are there to remind us that the Church isn't something that is just in the here and now, but the Church is that whole company of people, departed this life and alive at the present moment, whose lives are directed towards God. So, the icons are at one a symbol of our Orthodox faith, a proclamation of our belief in the Incarnation and also they are our family photographs of those members of our family of the Church, who - as the author of the epistle to the Hebrews would say - have already passed 'within the veil'.
Images have always played a part in teaching Christians about their faith. Icons are much more than religious pictures. They are a way of telling people about some complicated Christian teaching in a simple form that anyone can see and start to understand - even a tiny child. Icons in the earliest days of the Church were a means of depicting Gospel events to Christians who may not have been able to read the Gospel themselves.
In Icons of the Saints, the pictures do not look like pictures of ordinary flesh and blood. The Church teaches that Christ had a human body in order to save our bodies as well as our souls. At the end of time, when Christ comes again, everyone will rise from the dead. We will not look the same as we do now. We will be utterly changed, and we will shine with the glory of God. Icons show people with that sort of body -- a Resurrection body. The Church also teaches that all people are made in the image and likeness of God. In a way then, the Saints are living 'Icons' of Christ. Because Christ was God and Man at the same time. He was able to show us just what that image and likeness of God can actually look like. The Gospels tell us that once, at a place called Mount Tabor, the Apostles saw that Christ was shining with light. (Matt. 17. 1-13; Mark 9. 2-13; Luke 9. 28-36) The same thing sometimes happens to people who live a very holy life. When they are deep in prayer they shine with a mysterious light. Their bodies have been changed so that they show the image and likeness of God. They are holy flesh. Not all of the Saints show this sort of holiness on the outside in their lives. More often they grow into the likeness of God in a hidden way, but all Icons of the Saints show that they have already changed from ordinary flesh and blood. Saints are depicted with a halo of light around their head.
adapted from "Explaining Icons" Stylite Publishing Ltd.