Looking

Oh it was lovely to see a longtime friend, a dear friend from high school, on Christmas Eve at church! We shared a hug, and stories of our grandchildren, in the few minutes we had to chat.

Before she left, she exclaimed, “You always look the same!”

My reply was a glib one, about applying more and more spackle as the years pass. But after she’d left it occurred to me that she looked the same to me, just the same as she did when we were fifteen. How else had I recognized she was there across the crowded church?

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

Because when we love, we look not at a face, but into a face. Love is looking for the one who is loved, through the face. And all the ages we have ever been are still inside us, looking out, to one degree or another. Maybe this is one of the things Jesus meant about needing to come to him as a little child. The little child you were, you still are. To be a whole person, you need to let this child be fully there, with all your other ages, looking out.

And when one who loves you sees that, you will look the same. It’s a glimpse, one we can manage in this life, of your eternal self.

Is this, then, one of the infinite glories of the Incarnation, of Jesus coming to us as a human baby? All the ages Jesus ever was were inside him during his earthly life, and, being a perfect human, he let all those ages have their place inside him in just the right way.

And being God, he looked truly and infinitely into a face, and through a face, and saw the whole person. This is the connection we were made for: to be safe, to be seen, to be received by our Maker, completely and forever.

Psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson says that when a baby is born, she is born looking for someone who is looking for her. Ideally loving parents will be there right away to meet baby’s gaze, a crucial first step in her journey of growing into a complete human being.

Entire literatures, vast museums of paintings, global empires and their rise and fall, are built around this theme, this looking, and either its frustration or its consummation. How many great human evils might have been averted by one person being able, in the difficult moment, to behold and love the person in front of them?

How many enormous calamities have actually been thwarted by the loving gaze, the assuring word, the safe presence of another? We cannot know, but we do know the chaos we create when this goes awry: the looking that is never properly returned becomes despair and eventually anger, the kind that crushes hearts and raises armies.

So this winter, while we live through the darkness and cold, let’s try to look. Really look — look into, look through, to the centre. Of others, certainly, but also of ourselves. Let the child at your core behold and be beheld.