The Shadow
Dear Editor,
Images. Pictures, stained glass windows, icons, statues, frescoes, paintings, ultrasounds, x-rays, movies, tattoos, pendants, et cetera. They shape our world. Our eyes are the window between our souls and the created world.
The season has passed where we remembered the birthday of mankind’s savior, our Lord Jesus the Christ. Many homes celebrated this birthday with a creche, a representation of a manger where the Babe lay in a crib in a house for animals, with others [critters and wise men, shepherds and angels] gathering around to love and adore.
The creche is a 3-D image. Images assist in remembering important things and can be most influential in forming our hearts and minds by informing our hearts and minds.
They ignite our imagination. Husbands carry wallet pictures of their wives. Many carry wallet-sized pictures of their children, pets, deceased parents.
Many wear crosses or medals on necklaces. Pictures can cover entire walls of some homes. Smart phones can hold thousands of pictures.
Regarding those one loves, one is not in love with their image, but with who the image represents. When someone kisses a picture, they are expressing affection for who is in the picture, not the picture itself.
Images have power and influence. This explains why visual representations are suppressed or promoted, depending on the point of view or the ideology one holds. Examples abound.
Pictures of our black brethren being lynched and brutalized helped change America’s understanding of racial injustice. Pictures of mass graves, gas chambers, and concentration camps helped the world understand the “holocaust,”?Hitler’s final solution to the “problem” of Jews. Pictures of starving or disfigured children are used in television commercials to expose the plight of the disadvantaged around the globe, appeal to our charitable nature to offer monetary aid to reduce their suffering. Ditto for research facilities/hospitals who admirably work to end debilitating suffering and disease.
Abortion photos and videos are blacked out by our media. Abortion is the murder of innocents, made crystal clear with pictures that cut through the fog of the euphemisms and lies of the press, “woman’s rights” groups, Planned Parent-hood, the Democrats and even some churches.
Such photos do clarify the term “reproductive right,” a “right” to have a baby dismembered and discarded, a quite barbaric thought and “procedure.” It’s true.
On the positive side, ultrasound images are used by expectant parents to view their babe and know the baby’s sex, if so desired. The Catholic church has used images in the form of stained glass windows and commissioned paintings for centuries. In the ages before formal schools where everyone could learn to read, art and stained glass windows were used to tell stories and depict events.
Europe’s “common” language, for so many centuries, was Latin. Latin was the “vulgar,” or “common,”? language, thus the name given to the Vulgate Bible. The majority of people could not read, but they could see. Thus the church had scenes of our Lord’s life depicted in windows of colored stained glass mosaics. Illiterate people could learn about Jesus, his passion, and his plan of salvation simply by going to church and looking at the windows and walls and ceiling frescoes. What a wonderful way to “preach” the Gospel to the poor!
As a sidebar, the Catholic church had been accused of forbidding families from owning their own Bibles. Before the printing press (~1436 by one Mr. Johannes Gutenberg), Bibles were meticulously copied with ink and pen, word for word, page by page, chapter by chapter, and book by book, by (usually) monks.
Often, a monk might devote near all of his adult life doing this in service to Jesus Christ and his church. Since it took such effort and time to copy a Bible by hand, the Bible was a very precious possession, besides being the Word of God, so it might be “locked up” or literally chained to a fixture in the church, to protect it from thieves and vandals.
Once the printing press arrived in history, Bibles could now be printed at much less expense, and even in different languages, allowing for much wider distribution and use in bringing Jesus’ message to the greater world.
The church still had the, now more difficult, responsibility of trying to preserve Holy Scripture from corruption and from errors in translations, including the entire removal of some books that have been in the canon of Sacred Scripture for some 15 centuries!
Getting back to images, they have sway on our hearts and minds and souls. It behooves each person to be responsible in what images one presents to another person, and why. It is also vital to exercise great caution in what we allow to enter into our own memory through our eyes, particularly via movies, magazines, videos and video games. Since some images may never leave us, pornography is particularly insidious, always tempting us toward sin and the degradation of a person’s dignity as a child of God.
Parents, responsible for the proper upbringing of their children, by necessity, must be selective in what they allow their kids to watch on TV, the computer, and what video games they can “play.”
A final thought. Jesus warns us, “I assure you, on judgment day people will be held accountable for every unguarded word they speak. By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”… Mt 12:36-37.
Might a corollary be: By the images you compiled in your heart and soul will you be acquitted or condemned. Did such images bring us closer to God and His love for us or drive us away from Him?
Through negligence or sloth, did we allow our children’s hearts and minds to be edified or corrupted?
Something to give serious thought to. God forgive us all.
Sincerely,
John Stec
Green Violet Drive, Covington
