{"id":26636,"date":"2026-04-22T23:31:54","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T03:31:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?p=26636"},"modified":"2026-04-22T23:31:54","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T03:31:54","slug":"when-we-smash-the-divine-image","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/","title":{"rendered":"When We Smash the Divine Image"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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image via Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I saw that photo, of an IDF soldier smashing a crucifix in Lebanon.<\/a><\/h3>\n

I saw it several times. Everywhere I scrolled on social media, I saw it: a rather pink plaster corpus, upside down with his feet in the air, and a man slamming into it with a great big hammer.<\/p>\n

It hurt just to look at, and as I looked, a thousand images ran through my mind\u2013 not words or sentences or morals of the story, just images and feelings. The horrible twisting in my gut that I\u2019d felt when I heard about the October 7th attack. My gut twisting the opposite way when the bombing of Gaza began. That exact same twist as when Russia began its campaign against Ukraine. The same as the twist when I watched the policeman kneeling on George Floyd\u2019s neck. The same as when I watched people plummeting from buildings in New York, two decades ago.<\/p>\n

I remembered the stolen corpse<\/a> that I saw lying naked on an altar in that hideous video the disgraced false priest Frank Pavone posted online, just before election day in 2016, and my stomach twisting just as it was twisting now.<\/p>\n

I remembered my mother shaking in shock as she described the Columbine Massacre to me, while the newscaster reported it on the radio of our mini van as we drove home from band practice, twenty-five years ago. I remember shaking in shock myself, as I looked at a photo of my grandfather in a coma in the hospital just before he passed away, eleven years ago.\u00a0 The little jagged line on the chart shooting up and up and up, as the deaths from COVID-19 increased exponentially, in Holy Week, six years ago. Adrienne getting so horribly sick with an unknown virus that year, and the fool of a pediatrician telling me not to bring her in for a test but to take care of her at home. The feeling that I\u2019d lose her. The unimaginable relief when she began to mend.<\/p>\n

I remembered how it felt when my stalking neighbor<\/a> really lost her mind once and for all, and I thought I was going to be killed\u2013 and then how it felt when I realized she was dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remembered that story I\u2019d heard, from some influencer I follow on social media, of a Jewish man\u2013 not Jesus but another Jewish man\u2013 walking on the Via Dolorosa.<\/h3>\n

I like to follow social media accounts of people who post videos of interesting things that they know about and I don\u2019t. I follow former Amish people, people with disabilities I don\u2019t have, psychologists, people who cook historic recipes, Protestant preachers, Jewish and Muslim people of various denominations. I always learn such interesting things. This gentleman talked about the time he\u2019d gone to the Holy Land, and prayed with some Christians walking on the Via Dolorosa\u2013 because Jesus was a Jewish man, and he wanted to pray and meditate about violence against Jewish people.<\/p>\n

I told that story to the children in my infamous after school geography club<\/a>, when I showed them videos of Jerusalem. We listened to Muslims chanting the Adahn at the Dome of the Rock and looked at photos of Jewish people praying at the Western Wall. We watched Christians carry a cross on the Via Dolorosa and receive the Holy Light at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I showed them Jewish people dancing to \u201cHavenu Shalom Aleichem\u201d and Palestinian children dancing a Dabke and Christians singing the Our Father in Aramaic.<\/p>\n

The children liked just about every one of those classes. I was surprised that the part they liked best was seeing people worshipping God in different countries. If I didn\u2019t tell them about the religions in a country, they\u2019d ask me to show them. We watched Syro Malabar Christians carrying icons on the backs of elephants, Peruvian Christians praying to El Se\u00f1or de los Temblores, Massai Christians jumping up and down at an outdoor Catholic Mass, Japanese Christians praying at the cathedral of Urakami Tenshudo. We watched a Muslim girl praying during Ramadan, Chinese dancers performing the Lion Dance to pray for luck, Jewish families lighting a menorah, Indian children giggling as they threw dye on one another on Holi.<\/p>\n

I told them that humans are in the image and likeness of God, and the more you learn about how interesting humans are, the less you\u2019ll want to fight wars with them.<\/h3>\n

\u201cThe best thing you can do for world peace is to learn,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t say out loud that war, killing, hurting somebody, is smashing that Divine image.<\/p>\n

I thought of all this, in a tangled up jumble of images,\u00a0 as I watched the soldier smash an image of God with a hammer.<\/p>\n

Statues can be replaced, but what about all those other images of God? The ones made of flesh and blood? The ones in Gaza, and Lebanon, and Iran, and all over the world, that are gone forever now?<\/p>\n

Do we understand what we do, when we do violence against one another?<\/p>\n

What if we didn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

What if we all chose to stop?<\/p>\n

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Mary Pezzulo is the author of\u00a0Meditations on the Way of the Cross,\u00a0<\/a>The Sorrows an<\/a>d Joys of Mary<\/a>, and\u00a0Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to \u201cThe Little Portion\u201d on\u00a0paypal<\/a>\u00a0or Mary Pezzulo on\u00a0venmo<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I saw that photo, of an IDF soldier smashing a crucifix in Lebanon. I saw it several times. Everywhere I scrolled on social media, I saw it: a rather pink plaster corpus, upside down with his feet in the air, and a man slamming into it with a great big hammer. It hurt just to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2694,"featured_media":15797,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14783,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-christianity","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen We Smash the Divine Image<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I told them that humans are in the image and likeness of God, and the more you learn about how interesting humans are...\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When We Smash the Divine Image\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I told them that humans are in the image and likeness of God, and the more you learn about how interesting humans are...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Steel Magnificat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-04-23T03:31:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/664\/2021\/10\/cross-gcee799d84_640.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"426\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mary Pezzulo\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Mary Pezzulo\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/\",\"name\":\"When We Smash the Divine Image\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2026-04-23T03:31:54+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-04-23T03:31:54+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/#\/schema\/person\/eefd606fd6f98b01cd46b38fcead458b\"},\"description\":\"I told them that humans are in the image and likeness of God, and the more you learn about how interesting humans are...\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/2026\/04\/when-we-smash-the-divine-image\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"When We Smash the Divine Image\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/\",\"name\":\"Steel Magnificat\",\"description\":\"Everything is grace\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/#\/schema\/person\/eefd606fd6f98b01cd46b38fcead458b\",\"name\":\"Mary Pezzulo\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/steelmagnificat\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b65a50a237f24be80481c3e40cdc1c15?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/b65a50a237f24be80481c3e40cdc1c15?s=96&d=identicon&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Mary Pezzulo\"},\"description\":\"Mary Pezzulo received her BA in English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. 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