Ugly Heads, Chipping Church

St Bartholomew’s Church in Chipping has inside a couple of pillars with carved images thereon. A squash-faced woman, a man with bulbous eyes and furrowed brow, a plain woman wearing a tight coif, an unfriendly dog and a harridan with disapproving look and crooked mouth: these grotesques have gazed out on the congregation for over 500 years. What the original stone mason was playing at, one cannot tell. Maybe he sought to immortalise the parish fishwives, local busy-bodies and village idiots. They certainly resemble the medieval equivalents of Mesdames Sharples, Caldwell and Longhurst of Coronation Street fame. When the Tudor reformers and Cromwellian puritans came along to destroy graven images, these they permitted to keep. Unlike the appealing, attractive features of most Roman idols- serene virgins and beaming saints- this ugly crew was unlikely to inspire worship in anyone.

 

When we humans create idols, we make them attractive. The blue-eyed heroines of European mythology, for example; the sensual adonises of Mount Olympus; the butch warriors of Scandinavia; we make our idols alluring. In modern Western culture, we are equally adept at skilfully recreating our ideals and projecting them onto the heavens. The liberal makes his god one of insipid banality, the angry fundamentalist’s deity echoes his own incandescent rage. 

The God of reality, though beautiful beyond description, hides His face from mortal men. His beauty cannot be admired by sinners, and when He joined our race 2000 years ago, He had no beauty or comeliness that we should desire Him. Even His angels hide their splendour that we may not see it. Those who worship Him do so in spirit and in truth, for they are fascinated by His great love for them and His awesome doings, such as creation and atonement. Having loved Him for His deeds, they will be afforded an eternity to gaze upon His beauty:

Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.

Psalm 50:2

Beware of the beautiful and attractive baubles of life, for they more readily become idols than the plain, the ugly, the common and the rude. The hideously deformed prince of hell masquerades as an angel of light, while the Rose of Sharon became a plain-looking carpenter.