Gorillas and Caesars!

 I’ve been struck by two very different images this.

One is of a gorilla, photo bombing someone taking a selfie.  She is Ndakasi, a mountain gorilla and she is sharing the moment with one of her friends at the gorilla orphanage in Virungo, Africa’s oldest national park located in the Congo.

Ndakasi died this week, aged 14 years, in the arms of the ranger, Andre Bauma, who rescued her back in 2007 when she was just two months old.  He parents had been shot dead by poachers and ever since the ranger, Bauma and the gorilla, Ndakasi have had something which seems like a father and daughter bond.

It’s a charming photo.  This adopted gorilla is doing her best, we are told, to imitate the man taking the selfie.

Those two words: adoption and imitation, are ones we often use when it comes to faith.  We are, as it were, ‘adopted’ by a loving and welcoming God as his beloved.  We then spend a lifetime of discipleship seeking to imitate the example left us by The Lord Jesus Christ.  We want our lives, in some small way, to reflect His.

Well, if Ndakasi looks statuesque in this photo my second image is actually a statue.  A statue of Julius Caesar.

I was listening to the engaging historian, Dr Mary Beard on the radio introduce her new book detailing the lives of the first dozen Caesars.  She mentioned that the Romans occasionally changed the heads on their statues.  So, if a Caesar’s reputation went down hill after the statue was erected, as it did in the case of both Nero and Caligula, rather than throw the statue in the river, the Romans simply pulled off that head and put another one on instead.  An early example of re-cycling!  So, Julius Caesar’s head was put on a statue of Alexander the Great.  One reputation on the way up, the other on the way down.

In fact the Romans had an official way of re-defining someone’s memory and it was called Damnation Memoriae.  It needed a vote in the Senate, and it effectively ‘corrected’ their image by taking them down a peg or two.  This happened to no less than 26 emperors; however, we must also be aware that the Senate deified another 25!

One of the problems we seem to be having with statues is accommodating the notion that all human beings are blended characters of the good and the bad.  Whilst we understandably want to re-evaluate whether people from the past deserve a place of honour, the truth is that statues, if they are of people, will inevitably be of flawed individuals.  And just changing their heads, as the Romans did, is not really a practical option in the current debate.

This leads me to rejoicing that in real life, before we immortalise anyone in stone, all of us are capable of change.  Indeed, it’s a mark of our maturity that we continue to grow, expand our understanding, and broaden our horizons.  We are a work in progress, not yet the finished article.  God and I know my faults, and by His grace, we are working on them together.  At least it’s one way to keep you head!