Image
Aman threatens to tweak a girl’s Internet photos using processing software so that she’d appear nude for all the world to see. An artist discombobulates the harmony of art and religion by throwing together, as in a collage, Christian images and wooden phalluses and condoms. Page designers make loud images of barely clad men and women the virtual frontispieces of tabloids and magazines. Men, as they work out in the gym, consider gawking at women stripteasers in a local bar to cap their Friday night out.
One need not be as spotless as the Blessed Virgin Mary to credibly call these spades what they are: Abuses of the gift of sight. “God gave us eyes/ And filled all the world with beauty/ Sunshine and trees and stars above,” among other creatures. My Colegio del Santo Niño mates and I sang as much at grade school graduation Mass back in ’94. Our Maker made us see so that we could behold beauty, find our way as we move about, read and pierce our cherished ones with a loving, compassionate gaze.
We often forget this truth and we cannot hope to re-member it, that is, make it part of ourselves, until our hearts comprehend and continually ponder the meaning of the greatest visual of all, that of Jesus Christ the God-man hanging on the cross. To paraphrase a preface that we pray at Mass, God gave us his Son to redeem us on Calvary so that He might see and love in us what He sees and loves in Christ.
What does our heavenly Father see and love in Christ? Not Jesus’ aptitude for performing miracles, charisma that lures even women He didn’t explicitly call nor his probably ascetic carpenter’s chiseled body. What God our Father finds beautiful and lovable in Jesus is the obedience of his body-soul, even to the point of self-oblation on the cross, which opened the possibility of restoration to every broken human being from Adam to the last boy or girl who will be conceived.
A rich young man once went up to Jesus, Saint Mark tells us, to ask what he must do to gain eternal life. Jesus said he must obey all the commandments. The man told Jesus that he did, ever since he was a boy. What was Jesus’ response? “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” (Mark 10:21)
ven though cynics tell us we’d be hard-pressed to find someone as obedient as that young man in our day, we’re still invited to seek, see, love, build up and encourage in one another that which is good, yielded and obedient to or at least pines for God. Like his image, in which we are made. For even if we lose everything God-like about us, we cannot undo having been made in his very image (not in the image of a demon or hippopotamus).
So what do we seek and find in looking at one another and at the images that we take or representations we make of ourselves? Do we seek to love and affirm the good and godly to experience the bliss-beyond-compare of loving communion with God and one another? Or do we seek and see one another and our photos, videos and statues as consumer goods, eye candies, drugs, quick fixes, momentary stimulants to use and use up or get hooked on; mere slabs of meat to ravish as we cave in to the dictates of lust and “in,” hip entertainment (or, in the case of men, because to relate in purity with women is deemed unmanly or “gay”)?
Gracious Lord forbid, for in the Body of Christ, no man is an island. The wounds of one man afflict all. Our individual failures in practicing the virtue of chastity, especially in the custody of our eyes; our abuse of one another who are children of God in the misuse of our vision, render society vulnerable to the kind of demons that tempt mothers and fathers to feed their kids to voyeurs and porn masters, to the evil spirits that prevail on artists to express themselves in an exhibit of works that pervert the sacred.
Rules and regulations won’t solve this turmoil in human souls as much as kindling our relationship with God will. Our Heavenly Father hasn’t been lacking in his efforts to purify our hearts and cleanse our eyes. Will we let him mold us? He began by sending us Christ, so that we may see God and realize that our souls thirst not for stimulants that wear off but for love-come-alive. Christ was reduced to a bloody pulp on the cross, to make us see that the glory of love is found not in a flawless, seductive physique but in a body-soul that ensures the good of the beloved even to the point of catching a grenade.
Throughout the centuries, Jesus Christ appeared and reappeared, appealing to our sense of sight so that we may keep looking at him in the eyes of our souls and seeing him in one another. In the 17th century, He appeared to Saint Mary Margaret Alacoque and encouraged us to honor the image in which He offers us his flaming, cross-topped, thorn-crowned heart in a nail-scarred hand. In the 20th century, the resurrected One appeared to Saint Faustina Kowalska with the rays of Divine Mercy shining from his heart. Since the Last Supper, Jesus has been available for all to gaze on and eat as the Bread of Life in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
When we gaze on him, we see the strength and glory of a love that is better than the kind of life we think satiates our cravings but really doesn’t. When we gaze on him and take him, we see how to look at the world and people with clean eyes and pure hearts; we see that impurity is spiritual suicide but that obedience to God, doing the will of the One who truly loves us, leads to joy.
“As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance,” Saint Peter tells us. “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.” (1 Peter 1:14, 18-19)
