Article June 27, 1988 Issue

Images

The Christian Science Monitor

Recently on the news, in back-to-back stories, a person being interviewed complained that violence had given her city a "bad image," and in the next segment pundits speculated about how "marketable" the image of a particular office seeker was.

It isn't uncommon these days for the word image to be used to mean the impression one wants to give others. We hear about a politician's "public image," about "image problems" and "image-making." And even though most of us aren't in the public eye as elected officials and celebrities are, we're daily bombarded with advertising and information that admonish or frighten or tempt us to alter how we appear to others by changing the way we dress, what we eat, how we talk, and whom we know—all in the interest of making ourselves attractive. It seems we're living in an increasingly image-conscious age.

The word image actually means a perfect likeness of something— like the impression of yourself you see in a mirror. That's the sense of image used in the Bible. And it is in examining the spiritual import of this word that we can find both the root of the trouble with image-consciousness and the way to be free of it.

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