A Grief Observed

p. 20

Your image of another person may have little to do with the actual person. It will do whatever you want it to: smile, frown, lie back for sex. You are the master. So the problem with images of God! They have “none of the rough, cleansing, tang of the other.” Just a kind of incestuous reproduction of the self. The incarnation is the supreme example of God’s iconoclasm.

 

p. 52

“Images of the holy easily become sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? . . . And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.”