The Trouble With Images, Part II

This is part two in Rebekah’s The Trouble With Images.  Part I is found here. 

The attitude that ”sex is for the man” and ”love is for the woman” cheats both the man and the woman out of a loving sexual relationship because then it becomes a mercenary exchange. She will satisfy him sexual and he will satisfy her emotionally.  It becomes a ”you give to me, I’ll give to you” sort of deal. The husband should not be cheated out of the joy of satisfying his wife, both her sexual and emotional needs.  Neither should the wife be cheated of the opportunity to serve her husband both emotionally and sexually. Then it is not a swap, but mutual servant-hood.

Our culture often bases sexuality in a fantasy world. People’s bodies are idealized and advertised using the same argument that all advertisers use: ”You deserve it – your life will be revolutionized by it.” This ploy has nothing of love in it, nothing of mutual submission to one another.  There is no concept of taking delight in the other person’s delight.  This sort of sexuality is all about one person seeking their own gain.  There is nothing of genuine fellowship, nothing of true intimacy here. We are all too satisfied with cheap representations because an actual relationship itself calls us to commitment, selflessness and vulnerability.

Maybe that is also why we often try to divorce our spiritual life from our ”practical” life.  It is easiest to go into a prayer closet and have an intimate experience with God and then forget Him during the rest of the day.  If we ”take God with us” it will dictate what we do with our bodies. (It is no coincidence that entering marriage involves relinquishing authority over one’s own body to one’s spouse [1 Cor. 7:4]).  Then He must have dominion over our daily lives: what we say, do and think. If we want control, we must make sure God stays in the bedroom to satisfy our wants only when we choose to visit Him. Yet, we often prefer syncretistic worship.

Let us not make our union with God a shredded affair or turn Him into a fantastical image.  Wasn’t that Israel’s problem? They did not desire God, but their idea of who God was (the Golden Calf, for example). They did not want a God to lead them, but a puppet god who would be subject to the will of man. But God is not like man – He desires true intimacy. He despises our addiction to images and is committed to breaking us of our idolatry so we will live no longer live in a fleeting fantasy world serving ourselves, but a real Eden where we will worship Him. There will be no more tearing apart of the man because he will be wholly devoted to God.

All this is not to say that all images or visual representations are innately evil.  To the contrary, we live in a world of mirrors, copies and foreshadows of what is and is to come.  These are good and necessary conduits of beauty.  We need visual reminders of that which is unseen.  A photograph of my mother may divorce her image from her self and in time replace her if I do not speak with her for a long time, but if I do converse with her on a regular basis the  photograph may be a good reminder of the mother I truly desire.  The problem comes when we cease to see these as agents of beauty or representations of reality and mistake the symbol for the thing itself.  

C.S. Lewis put it well in The Weight of Glory:

The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.  These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.  For they are no the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not yet visited.