Shroud of Turin
March is at an end as we enter into the Holy Week — three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, celebrating the life, torture, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. My ten year old grandson and I tonight watched part of the History Channel’s presentation of The Real Face of Jesus. The Real Face of Jesus follows a team of graphic experts as they use cutting-edge 3D software to bring a holy relic known as the Shroud of Turin to life. It is fascinating to watch science and devotion combine to give us a possible image of the face of Jesus. One thing was clear from what I saw tonight: that the person, perhaps Jesus, on the cloth shroud was cruelly tortured before he was crucified.
I have been a strong advocate of the use of the five senses of the imagination, hearing, seeing, smell, touch and taste, when praying. St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises introduced me to this way of praying. My experience has been that it is easier for children to pray with the five sense of the imagination than adults. Sadly we seem to lose our imagination as we grow older.
Imagination is powerful tool for compassion and solidarity. If we can imagine the horrors of war or the cruelty of torture we are less likely to tolerate it in our society. If we can imagine the hunger that too many persons in the world suffer we can be in solidarity with them and act accordingly. In fact the first step toward real compassion and solidarity seems to be imaginative reflection.
I find that in our busy world imagination is at a loss. TV and modern day movies leave little to the imagination. As I observe and participate in this world of “reality TV” I long to stop, look, listen, smell, touch and taste life. Maybe seeing the real face of Jesus will help us to be aware that Jesus was truly human as well as God, and that is why his life, death and resurrection sparks our imagination.
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