A meditation on St. Nicholas Shrine, Ground Zero, and the providence of a life in the Great Church of Christ.
St Nicholas church entered my life in the 1980s or as i see now, i entered hers, when I was a 17-year-old prodigy art student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan. I was surrounded by exceptional art students, and together we explored the city’s sites and sounds with the restless appetite of youth.
Manhattan was my art classroom.
The city offered endless opportunities for discovery. Its streets seemed to pulse with color, fragrance, noise, movement, and possibility. The heat of the pavement rose through my shoes. I was immersed in the fashion world, the whole 1980’s NYC Studio 54 art scene, and the feverish energy of New York. Everything entered through the eyes, the ears, the nose, and the skin. You tasted its essence: chaos.
Reveling in our newfound freedoms. We laughed, explored, and moved through Manhattan with the careless confidence of people discovering that the world could be entered; and claimed. Then I, had the group stop at St. Nicholas to light a candle en route to photograph the Twin Towers for an artistic lunch excursion
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As we, Orthodox do, I lit a candle and did my cross.
The candle was small, but for a cool, quiet moment it interrupted the entire city. My ‘white-bread’ friends followed me into the church, but their expressions changed. The smiles disappeared. Some frowned, uncertain what to make of the sudden stillness. The air inside the church seemed almost physical: beeswax, incense, candlelight, darkened icons, and the hush that follows the city’s overwhelming assault.
For a brief moment, we stood together in quiet awe.
Some could not bear it. They left quickly, returning to the noise and freedom outside. Those who remained, even for a short while, seemed more restrained afterward. We had entered as children of the world, full of its pleasures and possibilities, and we emerged with the uneasy awareness that the world was not all there was.
The moment was fleeting. Soon the New York cacophony consumed us again. Walking among the towers, I felt the grandiosity of human achievement pressing upward around me. The cement canyons declared what mankind could build. The towers proclaimed ambition, intellect, labor, engineering, and will
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I could not have known then that both the towers and St. Nicholas would become part of a story I would carry for the rest of my life.
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A few years later, I came back to tiny St Nicholas as a subdeacon with Bishop Philip of Daphnousia later of Atlanta, in the mid-1980s.
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I was no longer visiting as a young art student who had paused to light a candle. I was standing within the life of the Great Church of Christ, serving at the altar and beginning to understand that the Church is not merely a building one enters. It is a living inheritance carried by bishops, priests, deacons, subdeacons, families, artists, and generations of faithful people.
Soon afterward, I painted two icons for St. Nicholas: Saint Nicholas and the Hospitality of Abraham. The St Nicholas church had entered my artistic life, and my artistic life had entered the church. The young man who had once lit a candle was becoming an iconographer.
On September 11, the place I had known as a landscape of my, our, ancestors’ achievements became a landscape of grief.
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The terrorist attacks transformed Ground Zero from a physical place into a wound in the consciousness of the world. The towers disappeared, and with them went a familiar part of my own visual and spiritual landscape.
St. Nicholas was destroyed beneath the catastrophe.
What few memories I had of the church, the towers, the candle, and Manhattan became crystallized. The young artist who had once wandered among the towers was now a witness to their destruction.
Those memories took shape in a commemorative giclée based on Luke 9:11. I offered it to specific patrons and benefactors who had suffered personal loss that day.
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The image was later produced as a postcard, and more than 100,000 were distributed. The postcard carried the memory beyond my own hands. It could be mailed, shared, saved, placed in a home, kept in an office, or given to someone whose grief had no adequate language. It entered the lives of people I would never meet.
The work was not an attempt to explain the tragedy. No image could explain it. It was an offering, a small vehicle for remembrance, hope, and prayer.
Some decade later I was commissioned by a private collector with particular devotion and I painted the icon of Saint Nicholas with pure gold leaf and palladium which hold tremendous signifigance to patron and event.
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These artistic benefactors belong to that noble tradition of Byzantine Christian benefactors who understand that beauty is a form of service. Through architecture, iconography, music, craftsmanship, and sacred space, they help make the invisible visible.
In that sense, they are the Metochitis of our age: patrons who understand that the arts can become a metochion, a place where heaven and earth meet, where the spiritual inheritance of Orthodoxy is made present within the life of the world
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I had the opportunity to meet and speak with Santiago Calatrava. Our conversations were brief but memorable. He approached the sacred place through architecture, structure, and light; I approached it through iconography, liturgy, and the inherited language of the Great Church of Christ.
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I was honored to meet a colleague, Father Luke of Mount Athos, Iconographer of the shrine. And His Grace Bishop Joachim of Amissos, iconography consultant interior beautification of the shrine. Their presence brought the fullness of Orthodox witness to the spiritual and monastic dimension; the shrine was not merely an architectural achievement or a memorial to the past. It was being prepared for prayer and for the living continuity of Orthodoxy.
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Sacred history does not eliminate ordinary life. It includes fatigue, logistics, confusion, humor, and the small details that become precious because they belong to a day we will never experience again.
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By the time of the dedication of the St. Nicholas National Shrine, I was no longer simply the young artist who had wandered among the towers. I was a subdeacon, preacher, iconographer, and protocol Archon of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, appointed skevophylax for the service, venerating, transferring, and liturgically preparing for the dedication by His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
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The story became larger than my own memory when I stood at Ground Zero with my son. I have the humble and memorable honor of serve under his leadership for many similar events.
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He was a seminarian at HCHC in Brookline Mass. Today, Father Stavronikitas serves at a parish named Holy Trinity–St. Nicholas Church. That detail gathers the entire story into one human line. I had entered St. Nicholas as a young man discovering Manhattan. I had served the Great Church of Christ as a subdeacon, painted its icons as an iconographer for 40 years, mourned Ground Zero’s destruction, and witnessed its restoration. Now I stood beside my son, who had entered the same Great Church in his own generation and had become a priest.
The chain was not broken.
At Ground Zero, the great voids marked where the towers had stood. Above them rose One World Trade Center, another monument to mankind’s ability to build again. Nearby, St. Nicholas stood renewed, not as a denial of what had happened, but as a sign that faith, memory, and beauty can emerge from devastation.
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The city was strangely quiet.
For a moment, the traffic, machinery, and crowds seemed to recede. The shrine held its silence. I could almost feel the young man I had been: entering the church with his white-bread friends, lighting a candle, sensing without understanding that another reality existed beneath the noise of Manhattan.
Glory to God for all things
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