Wendy: Our next question is from an anonymous listener. "Hi Christopher and Wendy, your podcast has been so helpful in my discerning of Catholicism. So, thank you so much."
Christopher: You are welcome so much.
Wendy: "I come from a Protestant background, and now that I am more open to icons and statues than I was before, I was wondering if you could please explain why Catholics venerate them bodily. I get that the honor is for the one the image represents and not the image itself, but that still troubles me because I wrestle with scriptures like Revelation 19:10, where an angel does not want to be bowed down to, even in his immediate presence. I love looking at images, but still struggle with the idea of kissing or bowing to them. I was wondering if you could explain how Theology of the Body illuminates this."
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| Christ Pantocrator (Ruler of the Universe) |
Christopher: Sure, sure, sure. Thank you, first of all, for the question and for your honest seeking. Keep going, keep going. You're on an amazing journey and it ends in glory, so keep going.
I'm reminded of a story that I just heard from a friend of ours yesterday, and
I'm gonna use it to answer this question.
A friend of ours, our age, mid-50s, loved Sean Cassidy in the 70s. If you don't know who Sean Cassidy is, I'm not gonna get into that, but he was like a teen idol in the 70s and a musician. You can look him up.
But if you're our age, everybody in the 70s, when we were kids, knew Sean Cassidy. And he is touring now. And all these people in their 50s and 60s are going out to see him.
And our friend went out to see him. And this little 12-year-old came out of her when she was describing, with such glee, how delighted she was to go to see this Sean Cassidy concert. And she told the story of when she was a little girl, she had the Sean Cassidy picture on her, a poster on her wall.
And she would kiss it every night before she went to bed. All right. Why did she do that? Why would she kiss a poster?
It's not a real person. It's what's going on. But it's a genuine human gesture of wanting to express, think of that word express or expression.
Something inside us at an interior spiritual level wants to get pressed out, express. I once heard it said, and it's a great little insight into the, just the way our humanity works. Impression without expression leads to depression.
When we have something inside that wants to come out, and we don't let it come out, now, you know, that could be taken in the wrong way. I'm speaking of genuine human things that we feel inside. I'm not saying I have the sexual desire, if I don't express it, I'm going to be depressed.
I'm talking about a genuine human reality, right? So there's something beautiful in this little girl's heart, our friend, who's now in her 50s, that she wanted to kiss the Sean Cassidy poster, right? Something had been impressed on her heart. She wanted to express it. And she even told the story of how her babysitter caught her doing it, and that she said she looked stupid and she shouldn't do that.
A friend of ours, our age, mid-50s, loved Sean Cassidy in the 70s. If you don't know who Sean Cassidy is, I'm not gonna get into that, but he was like a teen idol in the 70s and a musician. You can look him up.
But if you're our age, everybody in the 70s, when we were kids, knew Sean Cassidy. And he is touring now. And all these people in their 50s and 60s are going out to see him.
And our friend went out to see him. And this little 12-year-old came out of her when she was describing, with such glee, how delighted she was to go to see this Sean Cassidy concert. And she told the story of when she was a little girl, she had the Sean Cassidy picture on her, a poster on her wall.
And she would kiss it every night before she went to bed. All right. Why did she do that? Why would she kiss a poster?
It's not a real person. It's what's going on. But it's a genuine human gesture of wanting to express, think of that word express or expression.
Something inside us at an interior spiritual level wants to get pressed out, express. I once heard it said, and it's a great little insight into the, just the way our humanity works. Impression without expression leads to depression.
When we have something inside that wants to come out, and we don't let it come out, now, you know, that could be taken in the wrong way. I'm speaking of genuine human things that we feel inside. I'm not saying I have the sexual desire, if I don't express it, I'm going to be depressed.
I'm talking about a genuine human reality, right? So there's something beautiful in this little girl's heart, our friend, who's now in her 50s, that she wanted to kiss the Sean Cassidy poster, right? Something had been impressed on her heart. She wanted to express it. And she even told the story of how her babysitter caught her doing it, and that she said she looked stupid and she shouldn't do that.
And I said, you know, have you ever prayed about that? Have you ever forgiven
that babysitter for doing that? And she immediately teared up, because that's
how deep this stuff goes. Like, this stuff is really in there.
It goes deep in our hearts, and we need to pay attention to those inner
workings. It is entirely human to want to show, like, I have a deep love,
deep, deep love for Mary, the mother of God, who's also my mother in the Order
of Grace. She's my mama, she's my mama.
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| Henry Ossawa Turner's painting "Annunciation" |
Now, she's also ascended bodily into heaven. So I don't get to hang out with her in the same way I get to hang out with my earthly mom, or my wife, or my sister. But man, wouldn't that be, I want to express, when I'm with you, my love, I get to express my love for you.
I get to press it out. I get to have a bodily expression of it by hugging you, holding you, kissing you, reaching out to touch your hand, and in the full beauty of our marital union. That's how we're made.
It has to do with the integrity of body and soul, that spiritual realities get expressed physically. And when I'm in the presence of, say, an icon of the Blessed Mother, that becomes an opportunity for me to express my love for that woman. And I know it's a piece of wood with paint on it, but it's a representation of that person.
And it's entirely in keeping with our humanity, with the way God made us, that we would express some genuine affection for our mother in the order of grace by kissing, by reverently, you know, like when I proposed to you, Wendy, I got down on one knee. I wasn't worshiping you as if you were God, but I was showing proper reverence for the sacredness of what was occurring. When somebody properly bows to an icon or a statue properly, you know, it could be disordered too, but it can be properly expressed, they're not worshiping the paint and the wood. They're showing a certain veneration for the person represented there. And if that representation is Christ, we worship Christ.
We never worship Mary. We never worship a saint, but we do worship Christ because he's God, right? So that bowing to the icon of Christ can be a show of worship to Christ himself.
Bowing to an icon of Mary or a saint can be a show of proper veneration or honor given to the person. You know, in cultures of the East, when people greet one another, they'll bow to each other. There's something beautiful about that showing reverence to the person.
I often do that. When I'm interacting with somebody and they're sharing certain aspects of their suffering or sacred aspects of their life, I'll bow out of reverence for the image of God in this person. Don't be afraid to express what is impressed on your heart.
So in answer to your question about what light does Theology of the Body have to shine on this, one of the brightest lights of the Theology of the Body is the utter insistence on the unity and integrity of body and soul, on the unity and integrity of our interior and exterior selves. And that veneration, honoring and worship itself demands bodily expression. Impression in this sense without expression leads to depression.
Wendy: Something I was reminded of in looking at this question is I once listened to a talk given by a Catholic apologist named Steve Ray, who also was from a Protestant background and became Catholic. And he was talking to Catholics to try to give us an understanding of how shocking some things about Catholicism are to Protestants. And he was talking about the fact of coming into a Catholic church and seeing all these paintings and statues and things that just feel so foreign.
And just to have some compassion for, like, the difficulty of entering into that world when that's not your world, when that's not how you've been raised, or just experienced faith before. And I just was grateful for his way, and I'm not doing it justice, but he really did give me, like, just a heart for, like, this is challenging. This is not easy to kind of make this journey here and to feel comfortable and at ease in something that seems so different.
So, you know, I am grateful to him for just shining that light for me on that experience. And I feel like there's just an honest, you know, I come from a Protestant background here, and I'm growing, but this is a thing that I'm still questioning. And I think all that you said, Christopher, was just shining like a light on just a Catholic understanding of our expressions of faith.
That is, yeah, we maybe as Protestants, there's been for Protestants, there's like a judgment toward it, a, you know, a meaning assigned to it. That that is, you know, like something that you need to avoid, that that's off or it's wrong. And so like, it's just understandable that there's this to wrestle with interiorly.
I think, you know, there, as you talked about the things that are in our hearts that get expressed, like, we can all find those things in our hearts. It's like, you know, what if you're at your, you know, you're somewhere and you encounter a photo of someone who has died, someone that you love, that's died, and you see that photo, and like, you actually want to show some tenderness to the photo because you missed the person, but you know that makes no sense, but you feel it. Like, oh, you know, you're careful with it and you gaze at it with love or, yeah, you hold it to your cheek.
I don't know, but there are things that like just happen in us because of our love. And yet there's also a way that that engaging our bodies can teach our hearts. So it can go the other way.
Like, it's not just that what's in our heart naturally comes out that way, but also the things we do physically are instructive to our hearts. So like, I remember recently seeing a little video of our grandson kissing Jesus' body on the crucifix. And he's learning something through that physical action that he's seen others do.
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| The Holy Trinity: Jesus felt abandoned... he wasn't. |
He's learning to treasure the gift of Jesus on the cross. Like, he's learning that as a tiny little person. And somewhere inside, I think, our hearts, you know, there's still those like little places in us that need those outward things to teach us.
And so when we're together with others, maybe it's, you know, Good Friday, and we have the opportunity to, if we, you know, attend a Good Friday service to kiss a crucifix. Like, how instructive for our hearts, at whatever stage of our faith journey that is, to physically embrace this representation of the Lord. It's like traveling through time to be present at His crucifixion and to, like, console Him with our love and our receiving of His gift.
That's beautiful. Sometimes we see a picture, a representation of a saint that we have been blessed by on our journey. Like, the point of saints is that they bless other people on their journey to the Lord.
Like, if you know them when they're alive or if you know of them after they're not alive, like, that's what they're doing. They're journeying to the Lord and they're helping us on our journey. Like, we could encounter that, and that gratitude we have could cause us to just pause, to pause and be recollected.
And that physical posture is showing our, like, tuning out of other things and being fully present to that profound gift of this person to us. So, yeah, I hope some of that is just speaking to your heart with your question about these things that, yeah, do seem weird and unfamiliar.
Christopher: Yeah, I think to sum up some of the differences here, I think you could see the difference in this light. At the root of Catholic theology and anthropology is a remarkable lack of suspicion towards our humanity, body and soul. And at the root of some, I don't want to make blank a statement here, but at the root of some Protestant approaches in theology is a really tragic suspicion towards our humanity, body and soul, and a blaming of the body.
Matter matters. The incarnation shows this so plainly. And those two starting points will take you out into a very different practice in the way you live out your faith.
So, it's not that the church does not take sin seriously. It does, but it doesn't. Sin is not powerful enough to undo or uproot the original goodness of our bodies and our souls.
That original goodness is retained. We are tragically fallen, but we are not utterly depraved because of sin. And that's a real difference in Catholic and Protestant approaches.
So anyway, I hope that's helpful to you.
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