Here's looking at you, Lord.

If you don't want to fall in love with the Catholic Church, you had better beware of icons. I know. Images depicting Jesus played a big role in bringing me into full communion with Catholicism. I remember with shame the patronizing view I once held of Catholics and their holy statues and pictures. Pleasant enough to look at, I admitted, but hardly useful for the prayers of a Protestant who prided himself on a grown-up, thought-out theology.

My comeuppance came one morning years ago when I had been going through a period of spiritual dryness. My too-feeble faith had set me to worrying whether the Jesus of history could really be divine. Did God really try to reach us humans by making something miraculous happen two millennia ago in Bethlehem and on Calvary?

Alone in our apartment with my doubts, I knelt by the bed seeking guidance. In a drawer of our bedside table, my dear wife Jean, a devoted cradle Catholic, keeps a small crucifix and a statuette of Mary holding the infant Jesus. On impulse I grasped the statuette in my left hand and the crucifix in my right.

Suddenly I knew the answer. One life right between my hands. God, the baby born of a woman, living one perfect human life right on through to God, the man, dying on the cross. Fully human and fully divine. Both were making themselves known to me, right here, physically in my grasp. It made such instant sense that my doubts washed away. I felt Jesus to be so close to me, so real, that I could never doubt him.

That day my cold, all-too-logical brain had reached for an answer, and my heart found it between those two little icons. I didn't rush out to join up, but I'm sure that moment by the bed on my knees started me on the road to study, thought, and prayer that would lead me eventually into the Catholic Church.

Later Jean bought me a tiny crucifix, and I carry it always. I also keep a little harp angel by our bed and hold her to say a special prayer morning and night. On the lamp above my desk hangs another angel who plays a cello. I look up at his wonderfully comforting smile, and through him I can feel God's love.

An icon originally referred to a special art form developed in the Eastern Church, but usage has broadened the word to mean any object that portrays or stands for something else. (My computer menu, for instance, even lists icons to show the symbols I can use.) How much do private icons like my crucifix and angels help Catholics I can't say, but I do know that for this Catholic-come-lately they are a constant reminder and renewer of my faith.

For our church it was not always so. The apostles and early fathers portrayed their Lord in words, not pictures. Only slowly did believers take up brushes and chisels to render a likeness of Jesus.

What took so long? It was no lack of fervor; many of the faithful worshiped so devoutly that they dared not depict their deity. And it was this fear that fueled a furious battle of ideas in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The lineup was iconoclasts versus iconophiles.

The iconoclasts were certain that the early Christians refrained from creating images because this could lead to worshiping idols. Paint a picture of Christ, they argued, and you are blaspheming because you show only his human side, not his divine side.

Not so, retorted the iconophiles. They drew a distinction between idols and icons. Never, they agreed, should you pray to an idol, a thing devoid of reality. But an icon, they insisted, stands for something real; so it can indeed stand for Jesus.

Gradually the iconophiles gained ground. Christians came to see that it was proper, even a duty, to portray our Lord whatever means mortal talent and ingenuity could devise. This paved the way for the great flowering of religious art during the Renaissance and after.

Today our church endorses icons wholeheartedly. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: "Christian iconography expresses in images the same gospel message that scripture communicates by words. Image and word illuminate each other."

I know icons work for me. That little crucifix in my pocket and those little angels are a big comfort. They help because just beyond them I can see God.