Imaging the Invisible

In recent weeks a set of pictures – in this case cartoons – have been at the centre of political debate and controversy across the world. The Danish economy has already lost tens of millions of euros and the country’s citizens feel besieged, all because of a set of pictures. We live in a colour saturated world – though not to date in the Parish Magazine! We live surrounded by images and yet we have little grasp of their power over us. And it is only events like the recent Danish controversy that make us sit up and give us pause for thought.

That controversy is couched in terms of free speech. Yet there is another side to the argument that is easily overlooked. After all, there is not just a freedom to publish, there is also a right to own the image. Think of Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who sought the right to a new face after terrible disfigurement. Across the world today many traditional communities continue to hold that the image is sacred. Capturing the face on film is for them a violation. The celluloid image, or now the digital image on a memory card, captures the soul of the person and so dispossesses the living of an identity. That may seem an extreme view and one difficult for us to comprehend. And yet all of us can feel the camera to be an intrusion into our privacy.

Faith communities approach the image in markedly different ways. It is said that the prophet Muhammad saw his wife Aisha with some decorated cushions in the home that she had bought for him. The prophet rebuked her: “The angels do not enter a house in which there are pictures” – a difficult prohibition indeed and one which today sits uneasily with contemporary Islam – what of watching TV let alone a cartoon? Islam has resisted making images, not because the image is sacred but the sacred is beyond images. Christian faith by contrast believes in the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Colossians 1:15). Images then can be holy but only if they are windows onto the spiritual which remains invisible beyond images.

With the arrival of Lent we remember Christ in the desert, fasting for forty days and forty nights. And the desert of course was free of images. Unless we retreated to the desert it would be near impossible for us to experience an image-free Lent but perhaps we can all use this Lent to free us from the power of images. And it is when we do that we unlock the power of imagination. May Lent then be a time for you to image the invisible.

 

Fr Andrew