Currently, my daughter cannot (or will not) pray before bedtime without “baby doll.” She needs to see baby doll reverently fold her soft, plastic hands in order to begin her own nightly ritual with Daddy.

She scrunches her eyes shut and leans in close to the devout baby doll and Daddy, as I wonder if the scent the manufacturer infused into plastic skin is acting like incense… “My First Worship Aid,” perhaps?

Contact with God has never happened in a dark, sterile vacuum. In one degree or another, communion with the Almighty, Infinite One is always mediated. 

Sometimes through scented vinyl, other times through folded hands. 

When God Looks Like Nothing 

I find it ironic the way we shut our eyes in prayer, painting the God in our head with the darkness of Exodus’ ninth plague rather than risk a created, visual distraction—our gaze being drawn to a bush as if it were burning, or to a distant mountain as if it were Sinai. 

I remember as a child, when I first fled to prayer for respite from overactive and invasive thoughts, how I would try to take comfort in holding a mental image of Jesus—very specifically, “Jesus” as portrayed by actor Bruce Marchiano. The disarmingly kind characterization of Christ was the first of its kind in a film on the scale of The Visual Bible’s “Matthew.” The cinematized version of the Gospel gave me a face, a voice, and even a soundtrack I needed for those first prayers to the Jesus I was just beginning to know that I needed.

In the years that followed, scrupulous, theologizing thoughts pushed this practice out of mind. Cautious of an imperfect association through an imperfect representation, I deliberately tried to picture nothing as I prayed (and this, too, may have been part of the “prayer-aid” that I needed at that time; there’s wisdom in recognizing the imperfection of all mere representations of God). 

Is it even desirable to have no mental imagery in our thoughts about God?

Besides the near impossibility of visual-izing no-thing, is it even desirable to have no mental imagery in our thoughts about God? To try to empty the mind instead of filling it? Who’s to say that a non-image representing the One Who is the Object of our worship would be the ideal, even if it were mentally possible? 

The Messenger Became the Medium

For the creature, every reality is received as a kind of message communicated through some channel—through some medium. Every created medium has limitations, but should that restrict the communication of divine truth? (For those of us who believe the Bible to truly be God’s Word, this hasn’t stopped us from trusting the reliable-yet-human translations of copyists’ manuscripts.)

The fact is, ever since a Man really lived who was really God, the mere photons and sound waves of this fallen world have been burdened with the responsibility of carrying their representation of the One True God to faulty eyes and ears. 

What canvas could hold paint in such a way as to perfectly portray Christ? And yet Jesus was “portrayed” by the light reflecting off the common atoms of our material world for His entire earthly life; His voice was carried by waves of pressure in the same air in which scents of the street hung.

What mere paint could be worthy of representing God? But by the same stroke: which of the foods Christ ate could have been worthy of nourishing—and therefore becoming, as it were—the very flesh and blood of God? 

Jesus walked our Earth. Is not our whole physical, created world now charged with the burden and the glory of the Incarnation? God becoming man is not an isolated event; God cannot uniquely, miraculously enter into His own creation without paradigm-shifting ripple effects. The Incarnation does not “change” some of Creation; it re-creates Creation itself. 

Surely, there is a risk when associating a created image with the reality of the Risen Lord. There is also risk when preaching about Him, singing about Him—even thinking about Him. That doesn’t mean we avoid the activity; it means we approach it with even greater respect. 

How It Reminds You

If our family home were ever burning (all inhabitants, obviously, being safe), my wife can tell you my answer to the age-old question: “What would you save?” The painting hanging in my study is not one she’s particularly proud of, but her portrait of our dog captures for me an essence of him that even photographs cannot. In some way—perhaps because it was painted by his only other owner in the world—our dog’s very essence seems contained in that portrait. 

I’m committed to that painting because my wife and I are committed to the dog it represents. It portrays him so well because it was painted by someone who understands and loves him like I do. If a better representation of him were ever created—coming from a place of even more understanding and love, carrying even more of him to the viewer—then that would become my new “save-from-the-fire” item.

Because that’s what makes an image important: how it reminds you who it’s of. 

And it’s what makes scented baby dolls and happy Jesus actors helpful: they’re just what we need, sometimes, to know the One we’ll need always.