Let Us make man in Our image.
(Genesis 1:26)
I used to pray in front of a Greek Icon of Jesus I had on my desk. One day, realising that that image took my imagination to the Byzantine Ancient world, rather than to the Jewish world of my Jewish Jesus, I decided to perform an “experiment”:
I prayed seeeing my own image in the mirror. This may be interpreted as an act of egolatry. But… let´s face it: to pray in front of a plaster, wood or stone image of Jesus, Mary, or any other saint is taken as idolatry by many Christians (protestants, especially), Muslims or the Jewish.
Personally, I don’t think veneration of images of any kind is opposed per se to the true adoration due to God alone, as long as the image help us to think in the invisible God. And this applies also to our own image.
At the beginning I tried this way of praying thinking of that quotation from the Genesis that says that any human being is an image of God. So, when I see myself, I see an image of God. This is comparable …More