How To See

Day 20  

How To See

 

A single moment passes so quickly, yet can change a life forever. This moment in my adolescence has never really left me. I was in the back seat of our family car. I watched the world from here a lot in my early years. I used to love long car rides, the passing scenery mingling with my day-dreams, the open Australian sky, presiding over cities, towns, fields and mountains. 

I saw so much from this seat. Day-dreamed so much. I was both a spectator and a player, removed from all I saw yet full of thoughts and judgements about it all. Oh how clever my thoughts were when I was young. As an adolescent I was a poet, philosopher, judge and jury. I had so many right answers. It is only now that I am old that I have grown stupider… and wiser. 

This day we were in Canberra. I don’t remember why. We were on our way somewhere, passing by, passing through.

That is when I saw him. That is when I didn’t see him. 

His head was tilted to one side with a strange twitch, his un-kept facial hair covered much of his face and had almost as many ‘locks’ as the long matted hair on his head. His clothes were dirty, life-dirty. If not for the car window I am certain his stench would have repelled me as much as in that moment his appearance did. 

One moment. 

Life is made up of moments. A moment is all it takes for one soul to size up another, one moment to see, one moment to not see. 

My father in the driver’s seat of the car had seen the man too. Strange how we can share the same moment and yet be miles away from each other within it. 

“Man, there are a lot of weirdo’s in this world!” I said. I spoke jokingly, inviting others to join in my wit, my scorn, my moment of keen insight.

My father slowed the car and pulled over to the side of the road. Quietly he stopped, turned around and…“NO!”. His shout was loud but at the same time measured, his eyes burning with passion and sadness all at once. An earnest calm returned to his ordinarily gentle voice, “…There are only frail lambs without a shepherd.” 

Eventually I started blinking again, eventually my breath returned and my heart rate settled down. I had no reply. There was none. 

My father turned around and started the car again. There was complete silence. Even the car engine seemed to be holding its breath. 

The few minutes it took to reach our destination felt like a millennia. 

I needed that long to think.

That day I had the uncomfortable realisation that it wasn’t just that I had made a nasty comment about a person more vulnerable than myself, but that when the words left my mouth, I had believed them. My comment only expressed the repulsion I had felt in my heart and therefore seen with my eyes. In an egocentric blur my youthful arrogance had been seeing, but not seeing. Not seeing how God sees. At all.

My father and I had seen the same thing, sat in the same car, passed by the same man, but our vision of the reality we were looking out at was poles apart. I had seen a weirdo. He’d seen a struggling human being.

French author Anais Nin wrote “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are”.   

My eyes. They are green with a hint of hazel but do they really see? What if the very eyes I look out from are tinted, skewed in some way? What if I don’t see the world as it is at all, but as my eyes are…or as my heart is. Broken. 

My eyes are older now. Perhaps a little wiser. I hope a lot kinder. But I know my vision is not often perfectly clear. 

Jesus this day thousands of years ago sat down on this mountainside and talked about how we humans see. In the Beatitudes He said…

 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”

Matthew 5:8

He connects our heart to our sight, because everything we see with our eyes passes first through the lens of our soul, our heart.  A pure heart will see more clearly. A pure heart has clear enough eyes to see God. And perhaps also the image of God in those around them.

Jesus now develops this theme of vision further as He challenges His listeners… Think about how you see!

‘The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’

Matthew 6:22-23

He encourages them (and us) to reflect not simply on what we see, but also on how we see, and whether we need to realign our vision of the world with God’s way of seeing it.

We, none of us see the world around us through unclouded vision. Our formative years form us, and more specifically form the attitudes and assumptions we wear as lenses as we live unthinkingly in this world. How we see always affects what we see.

The world we human beings re-created post-fall has fallen far from God’s original vision for it. In this world that now runs on money, greed, worldly success and status we have succumbed to the lie of grasping scarcity. The lie that there is not enough. And living in this lie we grow hard hearted and ‘stingy- eyed’  towards others. We begin to see human beings made in the image of God as categories of “us” and “them”, of “winners” and “losers”… as “weirdos” rather than children of God. And with our broken ways of seeing we deconstruct the humanity of both us and them.

As a worldly adolescent in the back seat of my parent’s car that day I didn’t see a human being made in God’s image. My eyes deconstructed the Imago Dei within both He and I as I verbalised my stingy-eyed gaze. I needed an eye operation… or rather a heart operation.  And I got one.

And I know I am not alone in my needing to learn how to see. Most of us, if we are honest, do not always live our lives looking out at this world with the eyes of our heavenly Father. 

Jesus’ whole life and message, and specifically His Sermon on the Mount is His invitation to all of us to see ourselves and the world through His eyes. To realign our sight with His vision of reality, a reality that is full of grace and generosity and Kingdom hope. And this Kingdom reality, God’s vision of reality is almost completely opposite to the reality projected by this world of grasping self interest.

Our God has always been a generous God. This world that God created, this life He gave us was always brimming over with abundant generous goodness. We need only to look around at the beautiful world He created to sense His immeasurable generosity.

Here in verses 6:22 and 6:23 the Greek word Jesus used for ‘healthy’ implies also ‘generous’ and the Greek for unhealthy implies also ‘stingy’. Eyes can be unhealthy and stingy. Or generous and healthy. 

Like God’s eyes.

God wants us to see as He sees- generously, brimming over with compassion and lovingkindness. So God incarnate came to breathe life back into His creation to challenge us to do the soul work to examine our eyes and our hearts… Think about how you see!

Eugene Petersons in the ‘The Message’ phrases it this way…

 “Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!”

Matthew 6:22-23 The Message Translation

God wants to invite us into a whole new way of seeing the world and a whole new way of seeing ourselves and one another in it; A kind of seeing, not based on our attitudes, assumptions or prejudices, but based on His generous lovingkindness at work in our hearts, opening our eyes. To Him. 

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” .  

Matthew 5:8

And blessed are the generous in heart, for they shall see the world as God sees it.  

 

 

Journaling The Journey 

How we see projects onto what we see, affecting our feelings and actions in the world. Jesus invites us to see ourselves and the world through His eyes. 

Here in Matthew 6:22 and 23 the Greek word used for healthy implies ‘generous’ and the Greek for unhealthy implies ‘stingy’.

Listen in stillness for a while. 

How does Jesus see you?

What does Jesus want to say to you about how you see yourself?

What does it mean to see yourself and others with healthy generosity?

 

Today’s Mountainside photograph was taken from Sugarloaf Mountain in Wales, UK