The tearing down of statues of Saint Junipero Serra in California, and the advocation of the destruction of other renditions of Christ and Mary that reflect Western European and White American skin tone isn’t so much about how Christ has been depicted, as it is about how Christians have (both past and present) failed to reflect Christ’s deep love for their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. What people of goodwill want destroyed is not the art or the icons or the images, but the attitudes, presumptions and mythology that have been allowed to persist both overtly and covertly.
On a conscious and unconscious level, news of atrocities, of brutality, of relentless cyclical poverty and violence inflicted on people of color, has been ignored as a matter of national policy. Tragedy after tragedy ho-hummed by the majority to the point, a person in a position of authority (the policeman), could know he was being filmed, and keep his knee on George Floyd’s neck despite cries from others and from George Floyd himself for mercy. Black lives need to matter to the nation, to everyone. Evidence over history has proven, they do not.
This is not an advocation for the removal of statues, art, icons or stain glass windows, it is a reflection on all the people, lives and history we’ve not preserved. We ought to be more dismayed at the smashed lives, the pulled down humans, and the paintings we’ve rendered as a society of our fellow human beings and of ourselves.
Christ came to us, he took fleshy form, he endured the reality of our reality, of a body and a skin and all that comes with being a person, bleeding, sweating, needing so much more than food, so much more than merely shelter. He came so we might know God, and when we depict him in a creshe or on the cross, we are attempting to convey that fleshy reality, to show the connection between God and man that Christ is.
Being human, we make God in our own image, but in doing so, we enter into the mystery of how Christ is more and yet fully us whether we know it or not. When we look at a cultural image of the crucified Jesus, we know it is Jesus by the cross and the nails, and the crown of thorns. When we see the incarnation in the stable, we know it is Jesus by the presence of Mary and Joseph, by the meagerness of his estate, and by the star and the angels. When we see Jesus in the Eucharist, we know Him in the breaking (a violence) of the bread, and we know Him by partaking in His feast of pouring out His blood.
The question remains for each of us, is if we can see Christ in the Eucharist, and know Him to be there in the bread that still looks like bread and the wine that still looks like wine, how is it, we have managed as Catholics, to not fully see Christ in those around us made in God’s image, whose wounds remain open and bleeding?
Statues can be recast, and glass, reformed into new images. Humans, though each, a mosaic of experiences and yet each a complete unique whole work of beautiful art, cannot be replaced. The lives destroyed by racism, the souls we injure and/or ignore, they are not lost to God, though we lose ourselves in committing the sin, we lose so much by not seeing those around us as our brothers and sisters in Christ. Each of us is worth a world of sparrows, as Saint Junipero might remind us, and thus is to be welcomed and allowed a home in our hearts and in our Church. Our faith demands it.
If you’re angry about the statues, remember the art is only important in calling us to sainthood, while the history is important in reminding us we’re not yet so holy. Even if in anger, all the statues and art are removed, Christ remains before us in the fleshy faces of everyone, and in the Eucharist. It is not the outside statues of stone we need to take down; it’s our own hearts that were hard enough to not see Christ in others.
Our use of icons to remind us of the fleshy flesh of our saints and the God we love, is not there to champion us, but to challenge us to go and wash the feet, feed the hungry, visit the prisoners, to care for the sick and bury the dead. The saints live, and work with us and through us now, or want to, and they would remind us, the statues aren’t where the sacred lies, the statues remind us to live sacred lives.
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