Magic Mirrors

Cre­ative writ­ers and movie pro­duc­ers have made use of trance-inducing mir­rors, from Nar­cis­sus look­ing at his reflec­tion in the water, to the Wicked Witch of Disney’s Snow White. Mir­rors are a way of enter­tain­ing small chil­dren for hours. We look at some­one look­ing back at us, and for a moment there is mys­tery and self-realization. A gift is offered and some­times a cor­re­spond­ing curse.
Life offers many tempt­ing mir­rors. Taken by his own good looks, Nar­cis­sus falls into his reflec­tion in the water and drowns. Movie char­ac­ters fall under the spells from the voices and out­lines they see too. For most men, our jobs are our spell-casting mir­rors. For oth­ers it is their fam­ily or bank account — even their own pic­tures in the paper or in bronze on the side of a build­ing. Suc­cess is what we look for in the mir­ror. Women want to see a never-fading beauty, and are will­ing to let the faces of their chil­dren or grand­chil­dren become their sub­sti­tute. Maybe this will make Eve’s beauty last for­ever!
Some­how, we want life to reaf­firm us. We want to see who we are from the out­side in, instead of the inside out. This is the temp­ta­tion: to iden­tify with our careers or fam­ily mem­bers and make idols out of them, that we can fall down and wor­ship as secret images of our­selves. We must be “greater than” on the out­side to com­pen­sate for feel­ing “less than” on the inside.
The best mir­ror is the Word — as Bible or per­son of Jesus. In per­fec­tion we see our flaws all the way through, but that is the beauty of it. Our voice in the mir­ror does not call us to act out evil, but to real­ize the inher­ent good still in a fallen world. It also calls us to see what we can be when we turn loose of our shal­low reflec­tions of lim­ited desires.
Self-worth is never proven. It is accepted by faith. We can­not find our beauty of soul vic­ar­i­ously in the poten­tials of oth­ers. We are first called to accept what we find on the out­side — no mat­ter how it looks now. Accep­tance is the key to find­ing the real self on the inside — that is so mag­nif­i­cent that no image could ever do it justice.