"My work isn't about form, it's about seeing," asserts the artist Roy Lichtenstein.  Though this is an aesthetic statement, an observation about the nature of an artist's craft, given the Advent season which surrounds us at the moment, we may profit from considering its sentiments in a theological light.  To the point, from the days of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to define form.  Is form, as Plato suggested, an ideal set in another realm, something into which we come, as he concluded, through the activity of the memory of our soul?  Or is form, as Plato's student Aristotle opined, simply a statement or expression about the characteristics of a given object of perception?
     If we assess these things in light of the Christian notion of incarnation, that God, in Jesus, became a human being, perhaps both positions are true.  If God is a distant form, lost in the heavens and beyond seeing, then we will not know him.  Yet if God is no more than an object of our sensory perceptions, as material as we, he may not be any greater or more useful than any other object on the planet.  If, however, God is a distant and omnipotent and loving and creator form that becomes an object of seeing, one to whom we can readily relate, well, then we have a profound artistic statement, one that affirms the wisdom of Lichtenstein's insight:  wouldn't we rather imagine--and have--a God whom we can see?