Images

In these retirement years where I have slowed down to match the pace of everything around me, there is time to think, consider, and even contemplate.  Actually, the time to do such things has always been in existence, I was just too busy to notice and pay attention.  One thing which has loomed larger in my view in these days is the power of images.  Images teach us.  Images point us toward God.  Jesus created images with His parables and the mystics create them with the language of their contemplative spirituality.  I am aware teaching and inspiring images have always been around me, but my eyes refused to see them.

 

Of course, there is much to learn about God and how God is at work in the world from the books which expound theology and doctrine.   Unlike doctrine which is ponderously precise, images give our imaginations room to soar and our spirits freedom to create.  Images are visible physical things which invite us to consider the invisible spiritual things.  There was a time when it seemed that most of the images in my world were in the enclosed sanctuaries where pulpit and pews were placed, but more recently, it seems that images are everywhere in the world around us. 

 

Images point us toward God and what it means to be connected to God as surely as any book on theology or Christian living.  Every blade of grass, every limb on a tree, every creature that flies and crawls no matter how great or small, everything that has life whether it has breath or not can be seen as an image which though physical points us toward the spiritual.  As surely as it is true of each one of us, so do the things of the creation bear the marking of the handiwork of God.  Images of the Creator abound in the huge sanctuary of the universe and all we need to see are eyes not so blinded as to keep us from seeing.