What Are You Looking at?


Dear Eugene,

 I saw the leg of a colleague's trousers speckled by dirt and felt sad.

 It was a big blemish, no little fault.  Like a blob of tar on old black-and-white movie, the story would go on despite it, sure enough, but if it doesn't cost too much money or effort one would wish the film be restored and the goop be gone.

 I don't pretend to know this colleague well.  He's always alone, that I know.  I imagine if there's a person whose appraisal he cares deeply enough about he would have his trousers unspeckled and quite easily too.

 "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."  I wonder if this is a statement about beauty or the eye or the beholder.  Whether our longing for beauty is going to make us or break us is at the mercy of our beholder.

 Considering the "difficult gospel" according to Rowan Williams, Mike Higton asked a series of questions about the loving gaze of God the beholder:

 "What difference would it have made if I had let myself believe that (...) I was held in a wholly loving gaze?

 What difference would it have made if I believed myself subject to a gaze which saw all my surface accidents and arrangements, all my inner habits and inheritances, all my anxieties and arrogances, all my history - and yet a gaze which nevertheless loved that whole tangled bundle which makes me the self I am, with an utterly free, utterly selfless love? What difference would it have made if I let myself believe that I was held in a loving gaze that saw all the twists and distortions of my messy self, all the harm that it can do and has done, but also saw all that it could become, all that it could give to others, and all that it could receive?

 And what difference would it have made if I had seen each face around me (...) as individually held in the same overwhelming, loving gaze? What difference would it have made if I believed each person around me to be loved with the same focus, by a love which saw each person's unique history, unique problems, unique capacity, unique gift?

 And what difference would it have made if I believed that this love nevertheless made no distinctions between people more worthy and people less worthy of love, no distinctions of race, religion, age, innocence, strength, or beauty: a lavish and indiscriminate love?

It was easy to jot these simple questions down, easy to think about them - but to believe in such a loving regard, and to let belief in it percolate down through all the sedimented layers of my awareness, would have been shattering. Such unfettered acceptance would have been utterly disarming; to believe such good news, such a Gospel, would have been very, very difficult."

 To believe is to "have faith," to trust this much is true and commit to oppose untruths about ourselves, about others and our relating to them, about how things work, how the world turns, how money is made and honey flows, how we look into mirror, line up for grocery, put things on our body, throw things away, take stock of memory, turn left or right or go straight, the very next look we give to the McD cashier, the next word we exchange with someone who has the power to make us or break us.

 The Gospel, the Good News pulls on every fiber of our being and invites us to see differently, born again to live again, in Truth at last.

 On my way home a man accused another passenger, "What are you looking at?"  Palpable tension filled the cabin of the small bus instantly.  He did not put particular emphasis on any word; all five of them were of the same seething force.  I can see if a gun could be used a gun was already used.

 Yours, Alex

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