大象传媒

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Julia Loveless

Good morning.

I will always vividly remember the first time I saw a film version of Oscar Wilde鈥檚 popular novel 鈥淭he Picture of Dorian Gray鈥�. There鈥檚 something quite different about reading something and then seeing it visually interpreted, viscerally, right before your eyes. For those of you less familiar, it鈥檚 a story about a man who sells his soul to always keep the appearance of youth and beauty. The cost, is a portrait of himself that he keeps hidden in his attic that shows his true self. While he walks the earth in porcelain perfection, the portrait shows his true existence - decaying and decimated; a picture of absolute inner death. It strikes me how quick we are to dismiss our own 鈥榠nner death鈥�. How quickly we brush over our faults, our flaws and our selfish decisions.

We think, perhaps, that because those deathly decisions don鈥檛 show on the outside of us that we鈥檙e somehow okay. Our inner world, the truth of our motivations, how we choose to wield power over those around us - it鈥檚 hidden from our view and therefore we think somehow, we are immune from its decaying effects. If each of us had a portrait in the attic showing a true depiction of our inner world, I wonder how many of us would even dare to take off the cover, look at it and learn from it.
God, I recognise this morning that there is mess within me. I am not immune from the complexity of a human heart and I know myself too well to think that my inner world is wholly pure. Forgive me for my faults - of which there are many - and mould me even more into a creature of purity, grace and love.

Amen.