Essays on Faith, Liturgy and Social Justice

"Across from this sacred place, through an opening of hedge, there is found another circle; in the midst of it is the Pieta. It is, paradoxically, a sorrowful but wonderful place. In every kind of weather She is there, holding her Son, the broken cradling the Broken, for the sin and salvation of the world. There are plain log seats around the sacred scene so that the visitor may sit, pray, stare, weep, hope, and in other ways drink from the inestimable, bottomless draughts of grace. What is brought home time and time again in such moments of "presence" is how God deigns to use the material world in order to lead us beyond the material world. Since the Incarnation, the "image" is no longer prohibited to the believer. For the "Word was made flesh and dwelt among us". No longer must God be viewed as so utterly transcendent that to depict Him in time would violate His Otherness. For God Himself has circumscribed an image for us in Christ Jesus, Who now belongs not only to eternity but also, through the incarnation, to time, even in His glorified body in heaven: He is forever, as the Creed declares, true God and true man. And thus the Otherness of God and His astounding humility and condescension are reconciled in Christ Jesus. The Sacred Humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, since it belongs to time as well as to eternity, can now be depicted in paint, in stone, and through other sacred mediums because Jesus is the "image of the invisible God...the figure of [the Father's] substance" (1).

Sitting before such an image is like sitting before a window into the Eternal. Just as the window is not the light which is refracted through it, neither is the image the Reality to which it points. But that Reality is refracted to us through the image as Presence, the sacred Presence of God, of the Theotokos, and of His Saints who have been transfigured, divinized in Him (2 Pet 1:4). We do not love the stone or the paint but, rather, that to which they point. More: It has been said that the difference between a sign and a symbol is that while the symbol is also a sign---to the extent that it points to something other than itself---the symbol, unlike the sign, participates in that reality to which it points. Thus the sacred image participates in that sacred reality---that Presence--- to which it points and thus belongs more to the order of symbol than sign.