Walsted Shares His Gifts as Priest and Iconographer

By Mary Beth Diss

The Rev. John H. Walsted had a divine vision as a young priest, and he has spent the rest of his life using his talents to share that revelation with the rest of the world.

While celebrating Mass at his parish in Portland, OR, Walsted saw the entire east wall of the church disappear, and in its place were hundreds of angels. “It was a dimension of existence that we have no ability to describe,” Walsted, who has lives in Staten Island, explained. “There was light and substance. It was very real.” During this experience, “time ceased to exist and spatial things became confused,” Walsted described. “It was another dimension. Things were no longer just three dimensional.” A wonderful feeling overtook him. Even though it had seemed like an eternity, no one at the Mass noticed anything out of the ordinary, or saw Walsted pause or make a mistake.

The vision occurred right before the sacrament of Communion, and Walsted saw the bread and wine of the Eucharist as the center of an hourglass. The congregation was on one half of the hourglass while the angels were on the other. Through Communion, the congregation passes through the center to the heavenly side. The parishioners weren’t receiving Communion, Walsted explained. They were entering into it — a phenomenon that Walsted noticed was not limited to one church or one liturgy, but open to all the faithful.

“There really is a place of meeting between heaven and earth,” he remarked. “It’s just that we look in all the wrong directions.” From that moment on, Walsted found his calling in iconography — an art form that he hopes will bring people in touch with the heaven he had the privilege of experiencing. “I wanted to express this belief through icons,” he decided.

This was a life-changing event for the young priest from Massachusetts. Walsted was the son of two prominent scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although math was the subject of choice for the family, Walsted felt out of place, not liking or doing particularly well in the field. By the age of 5, however, he had found his gift for art and started painting. By his high school years, Walsted considered himself a sculptor, working with three-dimensional art. He entered the University of Oregon as an architecture student, but changed his field to the history of architecture and fine art after deciding to go to seminary after college.

Sacred images had always been very important to him, but it was at college that Walsted first encountered icons. One gallery in the University of Oregon Museum of Art was dedicated solely to Russian icons. “I don’t know what drew me in,” he explained, “but I fell in the love with the stuff, and I couldn’t tell you why.” He began to ask around to find out more about the art form but he wasn’t very successful. One professor of art history told him, “Forget about iconography. It reached its height in the eighth century, and nothing creative has come out of it since.”

Walsted’s interest in icons continued, but he focused on other things. After college, he entered the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, becoming a parish priest in Salem, OR, and then Portland, where he beheld the heavenly vision. “Two weeks after that event I painted my first icon,” Walsted recalled, “but it fell to pieces.” Determined to improve, Walsted sought out experts in the field and began apprenticing with a well-known icon restorer, who taught Walsted the structure, glazes, materials and other facets of the art form. He began creating many icons, though not keeping track of where they went or to whom.

“I only relate to icons when I’m doing them,” Walsted explained. “I do enjoy looking at them, but it’s not with the same regard as when I’m creating them. I guess it is because they are meant for other people.

After joining the Holy Cross Monastery, Walsted lived in California, later moving to the East Coast to return to parish life as a priest. In 1982, he became Priest-in-Charge at Christ Church, Staten Island, and then Rector, beginning a 12-year tenure in the community he still calls home. When he started, the parish was facing a declining congregation and financial woes. By the time of his retirement in 1994, Walsted had turned the church around 180 degrees, making it financially solvent and bringing in a large and growing congregation.