Images
and the Sto. Niño
Nora
was a nurse by profession. She went to work in Saudi Arabia to earn
more money to send their children to college. This was difficult for
her family and especially for her husband, Jayme. Often, he told me,
he was tempted to go to another women but one thing saved him. There
was a large picture of Nora in their sala. When he felt tempted he
would gaze at it, sometimes he would even take it down and hug it.
This is what kept him faithful during those few years.
Today,
as we celebrate the feast of the Santo Niño we find ourselves
coming back to reflect on the place of images in Roman Catholic teaching.
There is no doubt that devotion to images, particularly to those of
the Santo Niño and of the Blessed Virgin, have done much to
preserve the Faith of the Filipino people. In times when the official
Church teaching kept God far from the people - they had little access
to the Scriptures and a liturgy in Latin performed facing the wall
- the people expressed their genuine faith instinct that God was close
through their devotion to images. Just as the picture of Nora brought
her close for Jayme, so our images bring God, and his friends and
relatives who are perceived as intermediaries with him, close to us.
But there is a difference. The picture of Nora helped Jayme to live
out the attitudes and values consistent with his love for her. Do
our religious devotions lead us to a way of living that is mature
and consistent with the faith that we profess?
We
find three stages of spiritual growth in the New Testament. The writers
were trying to answer the question: "Who was this man Jesus who
rose from the dead?" The first memories were of the extraordinary
happenings. Jesus had worked miracles of healing and feeding and bringing
back life. These stories probably grew as they were passed down by
word of mouth. Jesus is recorded, however, as playing down the miracles,
of asking people who were cured not to tell others about what happened.
He wanted people to come to him for more than the physical healing
that they could get from him. The second level of spiritual growth
concerns the attitudes that he taught. He taught love and forgiveness
towards all, even for one's enemies. St. Paul referred to this second
stage as finding the fruits of the Spirit - kindness, gentleness,
self-control, forgiveness, by which the inner person is changed. Then
as a result of the fruits of the Spirit we move into the third stage,
we discover that our value system has changed. We no longer seek power,
prestige and possessions. Rather, we see the blessedness of poverty,
weakness etc. We accept the values of the Beatitudes: a profound reversal
of conventional values.
As
we mature spiritually God is no longer sought in the extraordinary
but found in the ordinary. To see God is not to see anything different
but to see everything differently. The Church's role is to help Christianity
mature. We look back into our cultural roots to integrate and transcend
what went before. Prayer moves from merely asking God for what we
need to being with God in the silence of meditation, in perfect trust
that in his love he will do what is best for us.
There
is a certain danger in the image of the Santo Niño. It portrays
Christ as a child dressed as an adult. It could be seeking the best
of two worlds - the protection of a divine king on the one hand, but
then he is only a child and can be ignored when he makes difficult
demands on our behavior.
In
the ceremony of Baptism we place a white cloth on the baptized child
as a symbol of its purity and innocence. I always do it with a certain
pity for the child who will in a very short time be contaminated by
us adults who like to make symbolic gestures but rarely live up to
the values they express or the attitudes that they demand.
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Taken
from Sundays
into Silence - A Pathway to Life. Copyright © 1998 by Claretian
Publications
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