Secular Music and Theology Part 4: “Lies”
No one knows when the first manufactured mirror was invented by humans, but archaeologists have found polished stone mirrors dating back to around 8000 years ago. Over that course of time, humanity has had a complicated relationship with mirrors. We may say that they fuel our own narcissism, drawing us too deeply into focus on our own appearance and driving social stratification along the lines of beauty. In our modern day, we might blame our obsession with mirrors along with social media culture for eating and body image disorders that plague people of all ages, but especially teenagers. At the same time, we can also say that mirrors tell the cold, hard truth. When you look in a mirror, you are seeing the objective facts of who you are and what you look like. Then, there are the more bizarre views of mirrors. Horror films and literature love mirrors as portals to other dimensions or gateways to some cosmic evil. To see exactly what makes them so frightening, all one has to do is imagine seeing their own reflection blink.
Horror and mythology aside, I think we can all agree that mirrors tell us something objectively true. It is a pure reflection, an unbiased opinion. If you really want to know how you look, a mirror does a better job of communicating that than a friend would. And yet, in a world obsessed with the value of cold, objective facts, maybe we should learn to question the mirror. While it may be true that there are facts about our world, we can’t do anything with facts without interpreting them and then they become subjective. While the facts may not lie, we can certainly use true facts to lie to ourselves. A mirror won’t tell you if you look old or fat. Those terms are defined by society and a mirror doesn’t know those rules. In other words, the mirror can’t tell you your worth or value as a person, but you can, and you might not always tell yourself the truth.
“Lies” is not the most well known or popular song by Stan Rogers, and it doesn’t tell much of a story, just a middle aged woman looking in a mirror and having a bit of an existential crisis. Now, we might reject her concern with beauty as shallow, but I don’t think that is correct. We could argue that self-image should be less important, but we can’t dispense with the reality that self-image is, in fact, very important to us. Not everyone wants to be conventionally beautiful, but very few people want to look ugly or disturbing.
The woman in this song faces a problem. She is getting older. After having seven children and all the work she does around the house, the years have taken their toll. She isn’t the beauty she was when she was young. Maybe at one point she tied her self-image to her value as a person, and as she sees her beauty slipping away, she wonders if she will still be loved.
We often talk about the problem of our shame and guilt over sin that makes us doubt God’s love for us, and that is certainly a problem, but there is another problem that is also real and gets less attention. This woman hasn’t done anything wrong. She just got older. Her best years are behind her. She feels as if her life is spent. And that is probably something that many of us feel. As we age, we lack the energy and motivation we had in our youth. While we may still long for novelty and adventure, we may lack creativity for new ideas and our bodies slow us down. Not only does our appearance change, but we feel more pain in our body and take longer to recover from injuries or instances of particularly forceful exertion. We grow out of touch with what young people are doing and saying. Technology advances too quickly for us to keep up. We may feel irrelevant, left behind by the world, sitting on deferred dreams that collapse as we run out of time to keep hoping to do all the things we wanted in our lives. Maybe we feel like we’ve failed and we are running out of time and energy to amend our mistakes.
In the first two verses, the woman doubts the mirror, but it still has an impact on her. She tells herself that the mirror is telling her lies, but seeing the lines in her face, she struggles to know whether the mirror is lying or she is. Finally, she decides to put the mirror down. She thinks ahead to the weekend when she and her husband will go dancing. She imagines her husband looking at her, finding her face beautiful even when she doesn’t. Though she can no longer see the young beautiful maiden she once was in the mirror, she sees that image reflected in her husband’s eyes and decides that it was the mirror that was lying after all.
Maybe it wasn’t really the mirror that was lying. The mirror was just giving her facts, reflecting her world back to her, but she told herself a grim story. Doubting her self-worth, she couldn’t help but see an old woman where she expected beauty to be. She wept for what she had lost. But then, her husband’s eyes, beholding her from the depths of love, told her a different story. The beauty was still there. She just needed to look at herself through loving eyes.
When we look at ourselves, we rightly see a sinner. We are moved to repentance because we have failed, both in things we have done and in things we haven’t. We have hurt people, including ourselves. We have failed to accomplish those things that we have wanted to do. We have grown lazy and uncreative, closed off to the world. We may look at ourselves in the mirror and see someone old and out of touch, someone made ugly by sin and guilt. But what would happen if we saw ourselves reflected in God’s eyes? Wouldn’t we see the glory of a sinner redeemed, the beauty of a soul beloved by God? When we feel that we have lived long past our usefulness, God calls us to new adventures, renewing our commitment to God’s mission: the proclamation of the Gospel and self-giving love of our neighbor.
Unfortunately, mirrors are easy to come by. How many mirrors do you have in your house? But how do we find the reflective eye of God, where we can see ourselves the way God sees us? Thanks be to God, we have God’s Word in Scripture, in proclamation in church, and in Jesus Christ, God’s Word incarnate. While we may not be able to look into Christ’s eyes, when we dwell deeply in the Scripture and the Gospel proclaimed by the church, God shapes our lives into the mirror we need. Trusting in God’s love and guidance, we can look into the Word and God’s love for us, and then we can carry that into the world and reflect God’s love to others, so that all may come to see themselves through God’s loving eyes as sinners redeemed.
