Flapjack Friday: On Faces

According to Scripture, human beings are Imago Dei, created in God’s image. We are uniquely designed as God’s Imagers, reflecting God to each other. One of the most unique characteristics about human beings is the face. For example, you and I are capable of upwards of 10,000 facial expressions, genuine expressions are symmetrical, our facial dimensions align with other parts of our body, our lip prints are unique, our eyes reveal whether or not our smile is genuine.

The face is the one part of our body that we do not see, unless we look in a mirror. Once we see our reflection staring back, we might feel startled or fearful or disappointed. As I grow older, I have an image in my mind as to what I look like, until I look in the mirror and see an aging, wrinkling reflection. Did you know that the face shrinks as it gets older?

By looking at our own faces, we have a sense of what we are for others and what we are as others. Robert Scruton notes:

My face is the part of me to which others direct their attention, whenever they address me as ‘you’. I lie behind my face, and yet I am present in it, speaking and looking through a world of others who are in turn both revealed and concealed like me. My face is a boundary, a threshold, the place where I appear as the monarch appears on the balcony of a palace.[1]

As humans we interact a lot with our eyes. Someone might say with her voice and her mouth that everything is okay, but with her eyes she betrays pain or depression or distraction. As noted earlier, the face is a threshold at which we appear to one another and enter into dialogue. I am behind my blue eyes and you are behind yours and when I look into your eyes, I see the image of God and I reflect the same to you. Upon realizing this amazing truth, I find that looking into the eyes of a human being is a mysterious and kind of haunting experience.

Even though our faces are obscured these days either by a mask or by Zoom, take a minute to look a little more closely at the faces of people in your life and catch a glimmer of God’s image.

[1] Robert Scruton, The Face of God (New York, NY: Continuum Publishing Group, 2012), 78.