The Art of Image Crafting: How the Mirror Ruins Us

We come by it honestly. We live in a culture where image is everything. You are what you wear or you are what you buy. I don’t know if anyone says it outright, but it’s implied by every ad we see or hear on our Smart Phone, iPad, TV, or radio. You are a champion for the environment if you drive a Prius, you are rugged if you drive a Ford truck, and you are fitness guru if you wear Lulu Lemon. In the midst of selling products, companies have also learned the art of selling an image.

Intuitively, we pick up on this link. We marry our image with our identity and, suddenly, the importance of crafting a socially acceptable external image picks up great momentum. Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr, states that since the popularization of the mirror during the 1500’s, there has been an increasing tendency for “people…to live almost entirely outside of themselves. America has made an art form out of it through Hollywood and Madison Avenue. We really don’t live inside anymore, but we live through others’ eyes. ‘Am I color coordinated today?’ ‘Am I attractive?’ ‘Do I have a small enough waistline?’”[1]

American culture teaches us to be crafters of our external image and, so, we are conditioned to consider the image or the ‘brand’ we are putting out into the world. All of this crafting leads us to spend an inordinate amount of time considering, ‘how do others see me?’ And, moreover, ‘does the external image I’m crafting convey the type of person I want others to see me as?’

But could it be that in this culture, caught up in the flurry of selling products and the personal brand that is our image, that we are missing out on the life of the heart? While we are busy considering if we should go brown or blonde or which vacation pic we should use on our profile, we are missing out on our internal life?

As women in America, we are taught how to craft our image. We are given lessons in how to painstakingly craft our external selves: do’s and don’ts for hair and make-up, rules for wearing white after Labor Day, and every diet or exercise regime imaginable. But who has taught us how to tune in to the life our heart, to our internal desires and hopes or to the places that are in need of deep healing? Who has taught us to sense where God might be moving in our lives?

At our core, we are seeking wholeness, but we have been taught to look for it in all the wrong places. We are hungry for something real. Stay tuned.

1 Rohr, R. (2013). Everything Belongs. Crossroads Publishing.