The late media analyst and Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan said, “We become what we behold.” On Ash Wednesday, I stood in line to behold The Passion of the Christ for the first time.

The following morning, as I spent an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, I found it difficult to look directly at our Eucharistic Lord. Images from the film filled my mind, convicting me of my own complicity in Christ's suffering and death.

Looking back now, a few weeks further into Lent, I can see how the film put the season into sharper focus for me. In fact, I doubt I will ever be able to pray the same way again.

Images have a powerful effect on me. I know this because, as a child of the 1970s and '80s, I grew up on a daily diet of television. We seldom missed our favorite television shows, and the purchase of our first VCR and the arrival of MTV were watershed events in our home.

It turns out one of the biggest downsides of the long immersion in slick media images has been the dulling of my imagination and the blunting of my concentration. Prayer, for one thing, has never come easily to me.

In particular, I have a diffi-cult time envisioning Jesus in the mysteries of the rosary. Aside from the British, blue-eyed Christ Robert Powell gave us in Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, I've had few worthy cues.

That changed on Ash Wednesday.

James Caviezel's Jesus is as realistically human and as mysteriously divine as any imagination-challenged Christian could have hoped for. I was thankful Mel Gibson leavened the brutality of the Passion with snapshots of Jesus, his mother and the disciples. Some of these were even humorous. Whenever one of these flashbacks ended, I desperately wanted more.

Yet the primary focus of the film is Jesus' suffering and death — something that had been lost on me as a former Lutheran. The churches of my adolescent years were whitewashed; our altars were bare.

Gibson's film all but enters us into the prayer aids that are in every Catholic Church (or should be): the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross.

Christ wasn't scourged with soft pillows and gently taped to the cross. His blood was poured out to cleanse me from sin. My sins nailed him there. Gibson's film doesn't let me escape that fact. It forces me to confront all that my own sins have done to him, most especially after he is taken from the cross and laid in his mother's arms. Mary's penetrating gaze says: “Look what you've done to my son” and “Look what he has done for you.”

To sugarcoat Christ's suffering and death would be to indulge in what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” This the Lutheran theologian defined as “the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance … Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Real or costly grace, by comparison, costs a man his life. It is the grace made manifest by the life of Christ sacrificed to purchase man's redemption. Bonhoeffer himself died at the hands of the Nazis.

Gibson's film is first and foremost a work of art, but it is also more. It is a prayer — a living Stations of the Cross. As a motion picture it is also akin to an icon, for it offers a visual glimpse of a heavenly reality. In the weeks since I first saw it, I have found those intense images enriching my impoverished prayer life like few other prayer aids ever have.

My prayer now is that Marshall McLuhan's axiom proves true — for me and for millions of others.

Tim Drake writes from St. Cloud, Minnesota.