I am conscience that I do not always see well. I’m not talking about the state of my physical vision. I’m talking about my ability to observe, take in detail, emotionally interact with what I am observing. Some times I assume before I actually see. I want to see a particular thing in a certain way and my wanting pre- determines my what I actually take in. It takes work to get past my on visual filters, and I do not do it very well. Recently I was reading David McCullough’s fine book “The Greater Journey,” a chronicle of what happened when 19th century Americans (some famous and some not) travelled to Paris and how that city enlarged that field of vision. I was particularly struck by a journal entry quoted in the book from Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). She went to the Louvre first time and sat in front of Gericault’s huge painting “The Raft of the Medusa” for over an hour. The picture depicts the few survivors alone on a raft after a terrible and tragic shipwreck. She wrote, “I gazed until all surrounding objects disappeared, and I was alone in the wide Atlantic.” The painting “seized and controlled” her.
Have I ever seen as deeply as she described? Have I ever been moved by what I have seen so completely as that? No. I have been trained by television to be a cynical observer needing to be entertained, hungry for a progressive succession of images all flattened by the pixels of a large blue screen. Yes, I am occasionally moved, but such movements of my heart are only temporary as my restless mind scurries ahead for something else to catch my attention.
But even as my attention deficit 21st century mind continues to look for something else to take in, I long to be seen! I may be occasionally intoxicated by visual stimulation, but I am terrified that no one is really looking.
And yet I am always standing before the timeless Spirit of God before whom “all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid.” In a world were few see, I am so grateful that someone is looking- looking at us in love. Someone is listening. Someone is acting with power and compassion. God with us. We are seen, heard and known.
