I want to say to all the e-reader skeptics out there that I was one, too. I didn’t want a Kindle but was gifted one and I absolutely love it. The e-ink is fabulous. It’s not like reading off a screen at all. The only think I do miss is being able to thumb through pages to find something I’ve passed. I especially like the built-in dictionary. Some people uses fancy words and stuff…

But about the book itself: the story is about Dorian Gray who, as a beautiful young man, has a picture painted of him that, as they say, captures him perfectly. He’s so enthralled by the beauty and wonder of youth that he wishes for the picture to age instead of him. And his wish is granted.

The story goes on to chronicle the life that ensues, a life in which the vanity and apparent freedom from recrimination that the Dorian Gray embodies destroys his soul. The picture ages gruesomely, and he knows that he has escaped nothing, and been trapped by something awful.

The story contains some forthright reflection on issues of sin and death; it echoes the Faustian questions of whether a sold soul can be redeemed.

But it also got me thinking of how it might embody other areas in life in which we are reticent to change, other than appearance. Is there an inherent death and decay that comes from holding onto something at a stage of development and insisting that this is the ideal of perfection? No doubt, we can treat our work in such a fashion–books that we’ve written (God help us if we ever so treat our blog posts!), ideas we’ve come to.

I sometimes wonder if there is an analogy to be had when we hold too tightly to particular moments of our theological past as well. When we idolatrously cling to a beautiful image of a pristine past, do we become the aging wraiths that bear the marks of hardening and degradation we will not allow to our systems? In this case, I know, the image is reversed. But…

The beauty of the thing frozen in time can become a mask for what lies beneath. We must age. We must grow old. We must die. Must our ideas as well? If not, are we not at least confronted with the possibility that we should say, “Yes, it was a beautiful child, and now it must become a man?”

Or maybe I just need a nap.

Image © Coris. Found at http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060524/060524_dorian_vmed_9a.widec.jpg