I WAS recently at a conference, “Restoring the Image”, at Pusey House, in Oxford. Its focus, from many different perspectives, was the imago Dei: what it means to say that humankind is made in the image and likeness of God. One might imagine theological conferences of this sort to be a bit niche, a bit specialised, and perhaps not always relevant. Not so. This one was compelling and timely.

Responses to contemporary crises and to the most modern of ethical challenges, whether posed by AI or drone warfare, all seemed, in the end, illuminated and sometimes clarified by reference to this notion of the imago Dei. The call for respect and dignity to be given to every individual, whether that call echoes across the hard-pressed wards of the NHS, the challenges and confusions of care homes, or the momentous choices about the beginning and end of life being made in the Houses of Parliament, seems also to be grounded in the sense that every person is made in God’s image and matters to God.

What that image is and how we reflect or hold it was a mystery approached from many angles, as Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican theologians spoke and listened. If Christ is himself eikon to theou, the true image of God, is it in Christ, or in growing Christ-likeness, that we bear the image? Or is it the image of the whole Trinity as a communion of persons, in love, that we bear: an image actualised only when we ourselves are in community and communion with one another? Or is the image borne especially by those who are most weak, most voiceless, most emptied of value by others, but found, therefore, in form most like the Christ who emptied himself and took the form of a servant?

I contributed some reflections on the witness of the poets to this debate over the centuries, and added one or two of my own. But it was only after the conference that I realised that it was a poem that I had written about St Veronica wiping the face of Jesus as he carried his cross towards Golgotha which said most of what I believe about the image of God in us, and how it is found and restored:

Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

Bystanders and bypassers turn away
And wipe his image from their memory.
She keeps her station. She is here to stay
And stem the flow. She is the reliquary
Of his last look on her. The bloody sweat
And salt tears of his love are soaking through
The folds of her devotion and the wet
Folds of her handkerchief, like the dew
Of morning, like a softening rain of grace.
Because she wiped the grime from off his skin,
And glimpsed the godhead in his human face
Whose hidden image we all bear within,
Through all our veils and shrouds of daily pain
The face of God is shining once again.