About face: Dana Smith’s Thought for the Week

‘I have a suggestion that might feel painfully unBritish.’

‘Remember my face’, my mother said to me before she died, expressing a deep human longing to be seen. When a beloved dies, that face is gone and never gone. They leave a remnant of themselves in our hearts, in our eyes, and in the way we see the world.

Our faces and our eyes are places of significant exchange, and profound meaning. And there are almost eight billion faces on earth. At the rate of one per second, it would take 237.8 years to see them all. Yet walking through my city, I rarely see any. The faces are all glued to little screens. How many times have we missed this rich source of meaning? Perhaps we need to amend the notion of walking cheerfully through the world seeing that of God in other human faces. Instead we could project a pixellated image, proving Hamlet right: ‘God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another.’

In the icon of the virgin Eleousa, the Christ child looks at his mama and she in turn gazes into our eyes. What he sees in her face becomes his own: she radiates his light. But not all faces can do this. At a recent gathering of Ukrainian mothers and their children, marking two years of war, I noticed that the faces of the ten-year-olds seemed too wise and too old.

Some days, I imagine a practice like walking meditation, in which I see the faces of others like time-sensitive miracles, ephemeral as March blossom. What seer or artist could ever tire of human faces? Is it any wonder that Leonardo da Vinci compulsively sketched them? Or that Shakespeare had so much to say about them?

A frail woman sits holding a few daffodils in an old coffee cup, offering me her face from the street. It is infinitely more than anything I might give her. A man selling drugs, a century-old face in a nursing home, all give their faces to me: wary, tired, uplifted.

Walking up a hill, reaching the top I turn round to look at the sun, just as a woman who has passed me turns around. We each recognise a face unknown yet seen.

Our faces, like doors, may swing shut. Or open. In Meeting for Worship, Friends have become a place where I can be gathered into seeing… often by virtue of being seen.

During chemotherapy, my face became a place of transformation. When I became bald as an infant, I’d nip into the loo in the hospital, look into the mirror, and greet myself like a newborn: Hello you, welcome! Who is teaching us to be merciful to our own faces? If we cannot show ourselves loving kindness, how can we ever be tender to the faces closest to us?

I have a suggestion that might feel painfully unBritish. I wonder how a quantum of the world’s suffering might be eased today by simply looking into our own faces with these gospel words: You are my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.

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