Smashing Idols

A friend was driving home from the hospice house in the middle of the night shortly after our friend, Beverly, died in 2000. Having been with Beverly until the end, she was suddenly aware of Beverly sitting in the car with her. Beverly looked at her and said, “How’d I do?”

Always the most exuberantly alive woman I ever knew, Beverly had died a good death and her friend told her so.

When I told the story to another friend, she said, “When you go, you’ll want to know, ‘How’d I look?’”

We laughed. Why deny it?

I remembered this story as I contemplated the question posed by Pastor John Cleghorn at a Lenten service last week: What is your idol?

My idols – the false gods I worship – are the things that I allow to control my life. The things I chase after. The things I think give me happiness or power or relief. My idols are things I don’t want to let go of that do not have my best interests at heart. My idols are many, I’m afraid, and shift from day to day or week to week, just to keep me off-guard.

Vanity is an idol of long-standing. No matter how faithfully I worship at the altar of vanity, I continue to get older, heavier, less gravity-resistant. As I edge toward my sixtieth year, the idol of vanity has less and less power to deliver on its promise that looking good makes life good. Yet the less power it has, the more desperately I cling to it. A sure sign, I would imagine, of any false god worth its salt: No matter how powerless it is to make my life better, it still has power over me.

Until I decide to smash it.

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