Seeing with the Heart
Seeing with the Heart Sharon Rodgers My sister Trudy has been visually challenged her entire life. A good friend who had perfectly fine corrected vision until a few years ago, is experiencing the center of her field of vision slowly fade away due to macular degeneration, while another friend has a difficult to treat form of glaucoma so her peripheral vision is disappearing. With these people constantly on my mind, I never take my eyesight for granted. Rather I give thanks daily, often when I’m out walking, that I can see the extraordinary beauty of the world around me. The blue sky, green grass, the shrubs, trees and flowers that are in bloom this time of year - what an extraordinary gift to be able to see and appreciate it all. At the same time, I’m acutely aware that what we see is only partly informed by the light waves that strike our eyes which in turn send signals to our brains that register as blue sky, green grass or whatever. The reality is we only see a fraction of what passes before us largely because we tend to see what we expect to see while failing to notice everything else. This can be problematic for law enforcement personnel trying to find out what happened during an accident or when a crime was committed when what witnesses to the event claim to have seen doesn’t agree. One of the things that influences what we see at any given moment is what we’ve been taught over a long period of time to expect to see. I’m sure you’ve all heard some version of that rhetorical question, If you encountered Jesus on the street today, would you follow him? This is immediately followed with, Well of course you would, if you knew it was Jesus. But how would you know? What does Jesus look like after all? I know I’m not alone when I tell you I grew up looking at countless images of what I call the Scandinavian Jesus. You know who I mean, that light skinned fellow with the sandy hair in kind of a page boy and light brown eyes. The man was Semitic!! I can’t help but think that images like those I just mentioned were at least partly responsible for an exchange I witnessed during a multigenerational education time in a small church I attended decades ago. We were studying the catechism I believe and I don’t remember what triggered the question but suddenly this very precocious six year old exclaimed, Wait, Jesus was Jewish?!? Well yes, replied the vicar. Huh, Christopher gasped… I always thought he was British! Spoken like a true Anglican, responded the vicar. But really, if in every picture of Jesus he’d ever seen Jesus looked like Sir Lancelot, why wouldn’t Christopher have leapt to that conclusion? For once I can assure you this is not simply a Caucasian issue. My two favorite images of Jesus, of all the paintings and other artwork I’ve seen during my life anywhere in the world, are two pictures that hang in the diocesan center in Cuernavaca. In one Jesus is laughing, and in the other he’s looking down at a baby in his arms. In both cases Jesus is moreno, that is, he has dark hair and brown skin. I’ve read that in many churches in Africa Jesus is portrayed as black. This is not illogical when you think about it. We’re taught all our lives that we are created in the image of God. If we understand that to mean we look like God, then it’s only reasonable to conclude that God looks like us. The issue then becomes, how narrowly do we define us? So considering all of this, I would argue that the most important seeing that occurs in our lives doesn’t rely simply on the light that strikes our eyes, but on what we see, or rather experience, with our hearts. Consider the disciples on the road to Emmaus whom we heard about in today’s Gospel reading. They spent hours, hours! walking with Jesus without ever realizing with whom they were walking. Think about that. These were people who walked the earth with Jesus. While it doesn’t sound like they were from the inner circle of twelve, they’re referred to as disciples so they surely had listened to