The Image of All Images
My Dear People,
"It peeled the bark off the tree."
What peeled the bark off the tree?
I had no idea.
The image was charged with meaning. But what meaning? And where did it come from? It kept bubbling up to the top of my consciousness, and yet I couldn't place it.
I have been in the woods a number of times lately (the Northern Neck, Pocahontas State Park, Roslyn, etc.), but I have not seen anyone or anything peel bark off a tree.
And then, amazingly, I stumbled on the source, "...On one of these days, when the pressure of Connor's hoses was so high that it peeled the bark off the trees..." In The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. King describes how the Birmingham police turned fire hoses on peaceful demonstrators.
I listened to an audio version of the book roughly five years ago and the image evidently stayed with me, even if not entirely consciously, so that when I began listening to the audio book for a second time, just recently, there it was once more: the trees with their bark peeled off.
But, again, the uncanny thing is that the image was already on my mind.
I suppose one might say that the potent image drew me back to the source, to the powerful story itself, a story of human dignity and courage in the face of prejudice and brutality.
That moment in history also made an appearance in a recent sermon I preached.
What first got all of this stirred up in my consciousness, I can't say. Nevertheless, the peeled bark represents the power of images to capture our imaginations, to touch our souls, and, indeed, ultimately to shape our lives. And surely a given image has all the more potential to affect us when we purposely give it our attention, when we, in a word, meditate upon it.
For us Christians the image of all images, the icon of all icons, is the Incarnate One, Jesus, who carried a cross, a tree stripped of its bark, to his grave, and then rose from the dead.
If we are all made in the image of God, then, so our faith teaches, in Jesus that image is brought to its perfection.
And so we look on him.
And our lives are changed.
Your brother in Christ,
Wallace+
