“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature…He likes matter. He invented it.”
C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity
My wife and I had one day and one day only to spend in Paris. We had a list of things we wanted to do. Get an espresso and a flakey, melt in your mouth, French croissant at an outdoor Paris bistro. We wanted to take some romantic pictures underneath the world-famous Eiffel Tower. Walk underneath the towering Arc de Triomphe. And of course, it was a must to see the Mona Lisa with our very own eyes.
So we woke up early, and immediately found a cute little coffee shop on the Champs-Élysées. I drank a black double shot espresso with my pinky finger up – I looked like the Scarlet Pimpernel – feeling like a very refined nobleman. And my wife said the croissant was truly heavenly. We were close to the Arc and made a quick jaunt to the Eiffel Tower, but our time was fading fast. So we bolted to the Louvre, the huge Art Museum located in the center of Paris. The Louvre is like no other museum on earth, it contains a vast network of floors and a labyrinth of hallways holding a treasure trove of world renown paintings and sculptures, all valued at well over $35 billion dollars, $35 billion!
It blew my mind.
My wife said, “Chris, quit gazing at every picture, we are here for one reason, to find that woman Mona.” We asked an attendant where she was hanging and they directed us to follow the obvious signs on the wall. She definitely was the star attraction. After running down two flights of stairs and weaving through dense crowds of people. we finally found her.
Can I be honest? I was expecting more.
There on the wall, she hung. A measly 2′ 6″ x 1′ 9″ rather drab oil painting. Compared to all the other masterpieces, this painting was tiny and nondescript. But there it stood, mounted firmly to the wall behind a sheet of protective glass. It seemed like everyone in the museum came to see her. All around the picture signs implored the visitors, “No Flash Photography”, “Do Not Get Close”, and “Be Respectful to All Guests.” Looking around the room I noticed every wall and corner had a video camera and large, armed guards were on alert keeping Mona safe. Why so much concern for such a relatively ugly little lady?
Well, I opened up the museum guide and I found out the reason why: The Mona Lisa is worth over $700 million dollars!
She was only made of paint and canvas? Why so expensive? Because of who painted her, the collective opinion of the experts and that smile. That mysterious, wonderful smile. All of this put together far outweighed the sum total of the paint and paper it was put on. But the way that paint and paper were put together made it priceless.
As I stood there gazing at the most famous painting known to man, I wondered what would happen if I just went up with a black magic marker and messed with Mona Lisa? What if I put a mustache on that famous smile? Or placed a Mike Tyson tattoo over her left eye? I would be summarily arrested and I am sure my wife would never see me again. But wait, don’t you think Mona needs to catch up with the times? And who cares what Leonardo Da Vinci thinks about his work of art? He is dead people!
Why can’t I exercise my creative freedom with Mona?
I ask this for a very obvious and serious reason: Every human being is far more important and priceless than a mere wall hanging made from oil. But we mess with our bodies every day. We don’t care what the creator says anymore, as Nietzsche argued, “Isn’t God Dead?” And if he is dead, we can do whatever we want with these bodies because they are just made from dirt and ash, aren’t they?
Who cares what God purposed for our bodies, we must be free to create as we wish. Pick any letter of the alphabet, it should be just fine. I know this to be true because over the weekend Anne Hathaway, the famous actress and famed Princess of Genovia, proclaimed at the human rights convention in Los Angeles,
“It is important to acknowledge with the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth…That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender….” And then she added, “Let’s tear this world apart and build a better one.”
Tear the world apart, or in other words, forget God’s design for human beings and let’s make it up as we go along. Let’s mess with Mona Lisa! When you mess with Mona Lisa you can only ruin what is priceless. The painter of humanity is perfect, every work he creates is flawless. When you mess with it, you can not improve upon it, only bring to it ruin and decay.
In your newfound freedom, you can try to repaint Mona Lisa, you may think it is better, but you will forever lose the magic of that smile. In our attempt at recreating humanity in our image, something will forever be lost, the magic of his image on humanity. The worth of each person will still be there, but it will be buried under the graffiti of our own ignorance.
