The new photos

We have new photos here at WORLD to do our part in keeping down fraud in the world. I was all for this practice back when it had to do with Time and Newsweek, which are magazines I was never in. I ridiculed Joan Rivers and Oprah Winfrey, who looked nothing like their pictures. I couldn’t even understand the strategy there: Wouldn’t enlightened self-interest alone dictate a policy of updating your file photo regularly, to minimize shock and disillusionment at public outings?

What’s bothering me is that my last picture in WORLD was pretty nice because it happened to be a good day when the photographer came. My hair was uncharacteristically thick and I had not lost my right incisor yet, and the blue shirt made me look as if I had azure eyes instead of dishwater color.

When you think about it, it is very odd that we should have to have new photos every five years just to be recognizable. I mean when you really think about it. If you do not find it odd, it is because you have become inured to the inevitability of decrepitude, but I would hope you would push back against that mindless resignation a bit. “In the beginning it was not so,” as Jesus said. He was talking about divorce at the time, but the same thing goes for corporeal corruption. God absolutely did not create the universe with the attitude, “Let us fashion mankind so that Marilyn Monroe will end up looking like Mother Teresa in 50 years.” Imagine the first human beings who witnessed their skin turning to crepe in slow motion.

Of course Mother Teresa (iconic age) is much more beautiful than Marilyn Monroe (iconic age) in the most important sense, but it will be hard to find many female takers for that more exalted definition when push comes to shove. My friend Barb works in a beauty salon, and she said women come in there practically on their deathbeds. She told me about one who announced upon walking through the door, “I couldn’t decide between here and the ER.” They laid her on a horizontal slab and worked on her locks the best they could.

WORLD is all about reality. Hard stuff happens, among which are that ‘the grass withers and the flower fades.’

My other friend K., of finer sensibilities, is disappointed that all the potential suitors on the Christian online dating services want to see her face right away. She prefers the way I got to know my husband through letter writing, with no photos for the first months. Young Jacob, on the other hand, chose Rachel over Leah on the basis of the visual alone, but the lesson we are meant to glean from that particular domestic fiasco remains ambiguous to me.

Speaking of Leah’s weak eyes, one of the stranger episodes in the Bible concerns Queen Jezebel who, upon seeing through an upper window the furious dust storm of her approaching equestrian executioner, proceeds to her vanity table and applies her makeup. She literally would not be caught dead without perfect mascara. Repentance and eternal life? What’s that?

Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray is an interesting character, bargaining with the dark side to have his oil portrait do the aging for him rather than his own fleshly visage. We are meant to take his miserable tragedy as a parable of the dangers of aestheticism, but how many women would queue up in a heartbeat to be the Dora version of Dorian, no questions asked?

The fictional Victorian fop’s biblical counterpart is the man described in Hosea 7:9 who has slipped into worldliness unawares and sees not the toll it has taken on him, and how each sin is etched upon his countenance: “Gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not.”

Some of you will want to go back to the old photos of your writers because you would rather live in unreality. But WORLD is all about reality. Hard stuff happens, among which are that “the grass withers and the flower fades.” So let us continue to render you this valuable service. If you liked us because we were young and cute, the new photos will show you how shallow you have been and that is useful information for your sanctification. Isn’t it just like God to bring to the surface the areas we must deal with?

Email aseupeterson@wng.org

Editor’s note: The new photos Andrée refers to in her column are in the newly redesigned print magazine and can be seen in our online E-zine or downloadable PDF. WORLD’s website will soon feature these new writer photos as well.