An LA Times story about a current exhibit:

For 94 members of St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, the freeway drive north to Brentwood in morning traffic was the equivalent of a pilgrimage.

They recently traveled in two buses to the Getty Museum and its current exhibition of ancient icons and spiritual artifacts from a monastery in the Sinai, a show that has taken on special meaning for Greek Orthodox and other denominations in Southern California.

More than 60 religious groups, including some from Fresno, Texas and Minnesota, are scheduled to see — and in some cases venerate — the items lent by the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine in Egypt.

Although the Getty remains just a snazzy art museum for other people, it is a holy place for the faithful. They are crossing themselves before the 750-year-old icon of Saint Theodosia and restraining themselves from kissing the plexiglass case holding a 1,500-year-old image of St. Peter the Apostle.

"It’s fantastic this is on the West Coast," Father Stephen Karcher, St. Paul’s assistant pastor, said at the exhibit. "I’m sure some of our people are feeling this connection. Especially in Southern California, our connection with Christianity doesn’t always go that far back, doesn’t go that deep. But when you see something like this, it has a lot of meaning. It shows we have roots, we have history."

As a result of Getty marketing and word of mouth, churches report high attendance for field trips to the show, which opened in November and is scheduled to end March 4. St. Paul’s will send two more busloads next month.

Formally titled "Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai," the exhibit offers a rare chance to see things that usually are kept at the remote monastery on the site near where the Bible says Moses received the Ten Commandments. The Greek Orthodox monastery founded in the 6th century holds some of the world’s oldest icons because it was isolated from the iconoclasm that destroyed many icons in the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries.