Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines
I.
Since his death in late August, I’ve been thinking often of the poet Wendell Berry. I’ve been revisiting his poetry and reading a collection of essays, and something about a couple lines from his poem How to Be a Poet (to remind myself) has been speaking deeply to me. Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.”
In this past Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus is confronted by the religious and political authorities about taxes. His response is clever enough to get past both groups. He asks them about the image on the coin. When they tell him it’s Caesar’s, Jesus answers, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.”
And what’s so brilliant about that answer, as many preachers have noted over the years, is that, while Caesar’s image might be on coins, the image of God is the more important one. And that image is in some sense present in all of creation. All of it was created by God, belongs to God, and is deeply loved by God. But, by grace alone, humans are marked in a particular way as made in the image of God.
To echo and alter Wendell Berry’s words: there are no unsacred people. There are simply those in whom we recognize the image of God, and those in whom we fail to recognize it.
II.
There is a glory in being human. A glory in reflecting that image as creatures. A glory that precedes anything like righteousness or holiness.
In his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo writes repeatedly and compellingly about what he calls the “grandeur” of being human. In our flaws and limits, in our being made in the image of God, and in the fact that, in the Incarnation, God came to dwell among us as one of us. And he writes all this in conversation with the very real, immediate challenges posed by the growth of artificial intelligence.
I’m not as intelligent as the Pope, and I don’t have the depth of knowledge he has about the subject. But, I’ve been reflecting on similar things in terms of the way technology is encroaching, always and repeatedly, on our everyday lives.
Some of this is wonderful. Every new technology has the possibility of being wielded as a tool that can contribute to the project of human flourishing. The issue is, it seems that the vast majority of new technologies today are not being used for that. Rather, they are being used as ways to encourage human convenience. And these are not the same things.
What I mean is that, it seems to me that the primary use of new technologies in our day is to enable us to deal less and less with actual, three-dimensional people. Maybe it’s the self-checkout line at the grocery store, which keeps us from looking the checkout person in the eye and asking how they are doing. Maybe it’s a website that ships every single good imaginable to our door, keeping us from the chore of leaving our house and going to the shop. Maybe it’s the way AI agents can give us answers to seemingly any question, so we don’t have to stoop to asking someone older and wiser about it. It also turns out we are as capable of ignoring the image of God in ourselves as in others. So maybe it’s outsourcing our writing to a machine that can do it faster and more simply than we can, so we don’t have to look deep within ourselves and wrestle with what we find there.
And do you see the trouble? If every person we know is made in the image of God, and if our technologies are built to keep us from having to interact with actual humans, those very technologies are keeping us from encountering the image of God.
And I get the draw of this, I really do. Time is limited. We have to cut corners where we can. And, even if they’re made in the image of God, spend enough time with people, and the only verdict you can come to is that they’re all a mess. Those more distant neighbors have all the wrong opinions, all the wrong politics, all the bad driving habits. Those nearer neighbors drive us crazy with their poor decisions, frustrating tendencies, and ability to fail repeatedly at putting their smelly soccer equipment in the garage.
And yet, they are made in the image of God. All of them.
III.
It’s easy to make this argument a way of running to the law. We religious types love nothing more than a new rule that will keep us in line. But, an insight of Christianity is this truly exasperating assertion that a new rule doesn’t change much of anything. So the law won’t get us anywhere. A technology fast won’t bring you one inch closer to the love of God. Swearing off ChatGPT won’t earn your salvation.
So it can’t be a question of law, but of grace. The invitation to encounter the image of God is about as gracious an invitation as I can imagine. And that’s exactly the invitation I want to leave you with.
What might this grace look like in your life? Could you take steps to keep from using technology as a way to short circuit the encounter with the actual real humans around you? John Prine said, “Blow up your TV, throw away your paper/ Go to the country, build you a home,” and as attractive as that sounds it might not be reasonable for most of us.
What is reasonable for all of us, though, is to trust that God’s image is imprinted on every person we meet—including ourselves—and to notice it. To make one decision every day that opens you to that encounter. It may not make for convenience, but the way of grace never really has. Another line from Wendell Berry comes to mind. It’s from his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front: “So, friends, every day do something / that won’t compute.”
The desire to see the image of God in others doesn’t always follow logic. It might plunge you into a joyful encounter with another person. It might also ask you to show patience with someone where everything in you wants to rage.
But looking into the eyes of another, seeing the image of God in them, meeting the beauty of the messiness and glory of being human that is present there—no convenience will ever match that grace.
