A welcome sight? Dana Smith’s Thought for the week
‘Christ asks us to see through our dead concepts.’
‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.’
So George Eliot writes. This level of seeing seems a high calling. Or maybe it is simpler than we suppose. Christ too asks us questions about ordinary life, vision and feeling. Will we see? It’s a question that is ongoing.
On a Woodbrooke course recently, we read the story of the woman washing Christ’s feet with her tears and anointing him. The others in the room see her as a prostitute, and they see Christ as unholy for not seeing that fact. He turns and asks, ‘Do you see this woman?’ Clearly they don’t. They only see hierarchy. Perhaps for a fleeting moment they see their racism and sexism. They do not see the human in front of them.
Christ asks them, and us, to see through our dead concepts. Who knew that this woman, a lover of truth, was seeing a deeper reality to which they were blind?
Throughout the gospels, Christ continues his litany of questions on seeing. Do you see these children? If you do, you’ll let them come to me. Can you see that unless you become like a child you will not enter the kingdom? Do you see this widow? With one mite she’s given more than all of you, because she has given everything.
The list goes on: see this wasteful son, he won’t be judged and rejected. He will be welcomed home. And see these people invited to the party who will not come? Well they’ll miss their opportunity, while passing strangers will be pulled through the door to celebrate.
Rowan Williams tells the story of a psychotherapist who worked with the criminally insane. When Williams asked him what the heart of his work entailed, he quoted Gloucester in Shakespeare’s King Lear, ‘see feelingly’. To this Lear responds: ‘A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears.’ ‘I have lost my way so I have no need of eyes,’ notes the blinded Gloucester. Yet by the end of the play, in recognising the true love and faithfulness of his son, Gloucester sees again. By living to see his son in his touch, he says,‘I’d say I had eyes again!’ Even the blind can learn to see feelingly.
This Advent, I may heed the words of Kent, when he later admonishes Lear with the words: ‘See better’.
On the road to Christ’s birth, I ask myself, who or what do I see? And what do I not want to see? Could it be that Christ’s view of the woman who washed his feet kindled a desire to do the same for his disciples? Does seeing work like that? Might one visionary light the way for another, and another? Can we see one another more fully in relation to the pressing concerns of our day?
Am I able and willing to be seen? In my Quaker community, my shadow and my light are beheld and upheld. What will it mean to be open to new ways of seeing, of seeing feelingly, in 2023?
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