Pip: If you have ever wondered whether a snowplow could double as a theological argument, Fr. John has an answer for you — and it leads somewhere genuinely worth going.
Mara: This episode follows one extended sermon from Candle in a Cave, working through the question of whose image we carry — and what happens when the world starts stamping its own version over it.
Pip: Caesar's coin, a damaged statue in Santiago, and a bird that cannot take off without wind. Let's start with the coin.
Whose Image Do You Actually Wear
Mara: The sermon opens with the familiar trap question put to Jesus — pay taxes to Rome, yes or no — and the answer that sidesteps the snare entirely. The real weight, though, lands on the second half of Jesus's reply, the half he leaves implied.
Pip: The setup for that implication is a direct citation from Genesis, and it lands like a key turning in a lock. Here it is: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."
Mara: So the upshot is this — the coin belongs to Caesar because it bears Caesar's image; you belong to God because you bear God's image. The logic is clean, and St. Hilary of Poitiers makes it explicit: "give therefore your money to Caesar, but preserve a conscience void of offense for God."
Pip: But here is the complication the sermon presses on. When a Roman emperor died, the mint started stamping new coins with the new face. The image changed. And the same drift, the sermon argues, happens to us — not that God's image leaves, but that the world layers its own stamp over it.
Mara: The illustration that makes this concrete is a damaged statue in the church of San Fiz of Solovio in Santiago, Spain — a figure that might be the Apostle John, but whose left hand is missing and whose identifying object is gone. A hundred percent positive identification was not possible.
Pip: Which is a quietly devastating image for what the sermon is actually asking: can the people around you still read whose you are?
Mara: And the sermon's answer to distortion is not the lecture everyone expects — more confession, more prayer, more Bible reading. Instead it reaches for St. Francis de Sales and a bird Aristotle called the apode, a creature with legs too weak to launch itself back into the air. The wind has to do it.
Pip: Grace as weather. You do not manufacture the lift; you open your wings.
Mara: The closing line the sermon returns to is from First John: "We love because he first loved us." The image of God may blur, the sermon says, but God's recognition of us does not fail — which is the exact reversal of the opening joke, where God genuinely could not pick Shirley out of a lineup.
Pip: Shirley worked very hard to become unrecognizable. The sermon's invitation runs the other direction entirely.
Mara: Not to make ourselves worthy before approaching, but to bring the distorted image — scars, world-stamps, and all — and open to the grace that has not stopped moving.
Mara: The coin, the statue, the apode — three images for the same question: what does it take to stay recognizable to the one who made you?
Pip: Apparently less effort than Shirley put in, and more willingness to let the wind do the work. More next time.
