“The eye adores the visible world,” John O’Donohue wrote. “Once it opens, it is already the guest at an unending feast of vision….[It] falls in love with the… visible. This fascination is addictive; then almost immediately our amnesia in relation to the invisible sets in. We live in this world as if it had always been our reality and will continue to be….Fixated on the visible, we forget that the decisive presences in our lives—soul, mind, thought, love, meaning, time, and life itself—are all invisible.” John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 187-88.
That fixation on the visible prevents us from seeing beneath the surface of reality more often than not. And, more often than not, it leads us to believe our perspective is accurate and to mistrust those with a different point of view. Our opinions and actions are colored by the play of dark and light. Even the words I’m using are visual—color, dark, light, view, perspective. As O’Donohue says, the visual is captivating. It is covertly addictive. It seduces us to remain on the surface because we falsely believe if we can SEE something then we both KNOW it AND understand it. The problem is we don’t just SEE. We interpret and judge and form opinions about what we see and then, without knowing, we plunge ourselves into darkness and are totally blind. We think we see but all we are seeing are our own biases, opinions, anxieties and judgments.
This is the problem facing those poor Pharisees accompanying Jesus in John’s Gospel. “Are you saying we are blind,” they ask? And Jesus says “yes.” In believing they already ‘know’, they are making no effort to see what’s in front of them—that God is doing something new in Jesus. That the Spirit is working through him. The face of the Divine is staring them in the face and they can’t see it. So—yes—they are blind without realizing it! How often does this happen to us, I wonder? How often is God staring us in the face and we don’t know it? We think we know what’s happening but we are only seeing the top layer while God is looking up at us from below the surface, from the actual heart of the matter?
God says to Samuel, “I do not see as people see: people look at appearances, but I look at the heart.” That is the constant Divine invitation—to look beneath the riveting, visible surface, to go deeper—to pause and peer into the heart. Insight depends on the ability to see in new ways. It reminds me of a Gestalt image I imagine many of you have seen. Depending on how you look at it the image will appear either as a vase or two faces. If, in first looking at the image, what you see is the vase, you need to sit patiently with a soft, receptive gaze until, eventually, the two faces appear. If you remain quietly receptive, your vision will shift again and the vase will magically leap forward and the faces disappear.
Looking with the heart is like this. It allows us to see with what we might call ‘an open mind,’ allowing the other to be who they are without judgment as we quietly remain ready to see God in them. Seeing opens us to being changed by what is revealed. Mystery lies under the surface. God is waiting there—drawing us deeper, fostering our innate ability to see what has seemed hidden. There’s no ‘sin’ in being truly blind, Jesus tells us. It’s when we hold on to opinions and perspectives that maintain or foster judgment, blindness, that we miss the mark. That’s what is meant by the word ‘sin’. Those judgments, and our resistance to change, interfere with our ability to shift focus. Then we don’t see the vase and only see the two opposing faces. We miss seeing God’s presence in our lives, in others, in the events of our day.
Pretend with me for a moment that our world is a Gestalt image and how we view today’s news is conditioned by emotions similar to those of the Temple authorities—anger, fear, disgust—and by the desire for things to improve in our lives. As we look at the world image we see it through this fog but we believe we see it the way it REALLY is, the RIGHT way. Using the Gestalt analogy, perhaps all we can see are those two opposing faces. We don’t see the vase containing the Spirit, God’s mysterious activity. And since we can’t see it, maybe we believe there is no vase. It isn’t there. Now let’s sit back for a minute and adopt a receptive, unfocused gaze while holding an image of the world. This time we subtract the emotion, desire and resistance. We just look—open, trusting. What, then, might we see?
Yesterday I experienced that kind of shape-shift as I thumbed through the front section of the Oregonian. I was internally bemoaning the ongoing litany of bad news—those opposing faces in every story—when I was struck by a short article headlined “Protests erupt on Women’s Day.” The first line reads: “Women across Europe and Asia shouted their demands for equality, respect and empowerment Thursday to mark International Women’s Day. Protesters in Spain launched a 24-hour strike and crowds of demonstrators filled the streets of Manila, Seoul and New Delhi.” Russia, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan saw protests as well, while #MeToo signs were prominent in South Korea. In that moment I saw, again, the two faces in opposition. Then I recognized the vase—the radical movement of Spirit orchestrating change beneath the surface and disrupting the foundation of reality as I have come to see it. Everywhere there are signs of God helping the blind to see as power players, our post-modern ‘Temple authorities’ are unmasked and fall from their lofty pedestals. The courage of the oppressed is rising in stark relief against the darkened background, and the prophets, visionary teachers and faithful critics of our time are slowly moving us forward.
Awaken, O sleeper, arise from the dead,” says the author of Ephesians. We must be aware of and remove our own intellectually, emotionally and culturally defined blinders so we can truly SEE. As we continue through Lent, open your inner eyes. Receptively, courageously gaze at the world around you. Search for the Spirit at work under the surface and, as Paul tells us today, Christ will give us light.
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