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Available for over a year

I have to admit that the search for the perfect selfie has never been the number one item on my to-do list. Nonetheless I was very struck a by a new app which is fast moving up the best seller list, one that seems to be a particular hit with teenage boys. It works by editing selfies to make you look more manly. You take a photo of yourself, use the app’s image manipulation software and hey presto, your body is transformed. Instead of that weedy tummy you have a rippling six pack. Instead of those stick-like arms you have bulging biceps worthy of Tyson Fury. Well I toyed with the idea of downloading it. A bit of harmless fun I thought. But as I reflected rather more deeply, it struck me how sinister this sort of thing can be. It seems to me that we live in a culture that is unhealthily obsessed with physical beauty and that this especially affects the young. Many teenagers are assailed on every side by images of the absurdly perfect human bodies of celebs and sport stars and they feel second rate and inadequate when they can’t achieve that for themselves. I vividly remember talking to a teenager at a youth event who said to me baldly, ‘I’m ugly aren’t I?’ Of course he wasn’t, but that’s what the culture tells him. These image manipulation apps, intended to entertain, could play deeply into that kind of anxiety by subconsciously telling young people that beauty is something they have to achieve through costly and complex external interventions or through dishonest misrepresentations of themselves. As a priest I wanted to encourage that teenager to approach the whole idea of human beauty very differently. A Christian understanding holds that beauty is not something we have to work for, pay for or strive to achieve by our own efforts. It is a gift. It is bestowed upon us. In the creation story in Genesis, there is a wonderful repeated refrain. ‘God saw all he had made, and behold it was very good.’ There is an inbuilt beauty to all things by virtue of their being created by a God who takes delight in what his hand has made. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’ So for a Christian, human life is beautiful because that is how God has made it to be. It is beautiful in its essence. Beauty is a gift to accept and grow into. That can lead to a very reassuring conclusion. There’s no need for lip gloss, gym workouts, apps or coiffurists. Of course it’s fine to enjoy such things, but they won’t bestow beauty. Look in the mirror. No matter what the reflection, you’re beautiful already.