Can You "Trash" an Icon?

R. Rev. Fr. Barouyr Shernezian, D.Min.

Members of the Armenian Church University Students Association (ACUSA - ՀԵՀՈՄ) engage with church attendees by placing stickers at the Catholicosate of the Holy See of Cilicia in Lebanon.

I remember when I was very little. We were always taught never to let the sacred images fall to the ground.

It was an ingrained lesson, a reflex passed down through generations. If a picture, whether an icon of Christ, the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, or a scene from the Gospels, ever slipped and dropped to the floor, we would immediately grab it, kiss it reverently, and place it on the table. It was our way of approaching these images differently than we would any other picture in our lives. They were not mere decorations; they carried the presence of the Holy. They demanded a different kind of behavior, a different kind of respect.

I also remember the great feast days. Young people would hand out stickers commemorating the feast day of the day, and we would wear them proudly on our shoulders. They were small, colorful reminders of why we were there and what we were honoring. But as the day went on, or even during the long liturgy, the adhesive would loosen, and the sticker would fall to the ground. Without a second thought, we would pick it up, press it back onto our shoulder, or tuck it safely into our pockets. It was unthinkable to leave it there to be trampled.

I once saw a man at church who embodied this spirit of reverence. He moved through the door of the church quietly, his eyes fixed on the floor. He was collecting every fallen image, every stray sticker, every crumpled prayer card that had been dropped and forgotten. He gathered them all, not out of compulsion, but out of a profound sense of duty. He did not want anyone, whether intentionally or by accident, to walk over those sacred faces without noticing. His quiet act was a sermon in itself.

This education in reverence ran deep. We were taught that disrespect was simply not acceptable for a Christian. And if, for whatever reason, you could no longer keep an image, there was a proper way to dispose of it: burning. Not as an act of hatred or iconoclasm, but as a dignified way of saying goodbye, a way that ensured the sacred would not be thrown carelessly among common refuse.

That lesson has stayed with me for decades. But recently, I found myself caught in a strange and unexpected dilemma.

I had been working on my laptop, preparing a presentation for children. I had gathered several images of Christ, along with other sacred scenes, to make the lesson visually engaging. When the presentation was finished, I started cleaning up my desktop. I no longer needed those images, so I selected them and prepared to delete them.

And then I froze.

My hand hovered over the trackpad. On a Mac, the standard way to delete a file is to drag it to the Trash. And in that moment, a familiar voice from my childhood whispered in my ear: You do not throw sacred images in the trash.

I sat there, paralyzed by the thought. Was I disrespecting the images of Christ? If I "threw them in the Trash," was I not doing the very thing I had been taught all my life to avoid? The context was digital, but the concept was the same. The file was not a physical print, yet it still bore the face of Christ. Did that change anything?

I realized, sitting there with my cursor hovering over the Trash bin, that I had no answer.

Most importantly, I began to think about how much our world has changed. We have moved into a completely new era, a digital era, but our Christian formation has not quite caught up with it. We have centuries of tradition on how to handle a physical icon: how to venerate it, how to store it, how to burn it with dignity. But we have no equivalent teaching for a JPEG. No one ever told us whether a pixelated image of Christ deserves the same reverence as an oil painting. No one taught us how to "delete" something sacred, or whether that is even possible.

We live in a time when sacred images are everywhere: on our phones, our computers, our social media feeds. They are shared, downloaded, screenshotted, and, eventually, deleted. And yet our theological education on these images remains rooted in the physical world. We have not yet learned how to be a Christian in the digital era: how to respect the sacred when it appears not on wood or paper, but on a glowing screen.

Maybe it is time we ask the difficult questions. What does reverence look like when an icon is a file? What does proper disposal mean in a world without fire? And how do we teach the next generation to honor the Holy, whether it hangs on a wall or appears on a monitor?

I don't have the answers. But I know this: the question itself matters. And asking it is already a form of respect.