To Love is to See
Day 10
Buechner reflects on what it means to love our neighbours…
“To love your neighbor is to see your neighbor. To see somebody, really to see somebody, you have to love somebody. You have to see people the way Rembrandt saw the old lady, not just a face that comes at you the way a dry leaf blows at you down the path like all other dry leaves, but in a way that you realize the face is something the likes of which you have never seen before and will never see again. To love somebody we must see that person’s face, and once in a while we do. Usually it is because something jolts us into seeing it.
“The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can’t really see them anymore. There’s Judy. There’s Sharman. There’s George. There’s Mary. We name them as we name the fog, they become just words, we name them out of existence, and that’s it. Imagine.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p39.
To help you reflect…
What or who do you tend to “name out of existence”? Whose face is so familiar to you that you can’t really see them anymore? Can you remember a time when you’ve been jolted into seeing them?
Play with looking at those you are closest to as though you didn’t know them, as though you were seeing them for the first time. Try to really see them and consider it an act of love.
I noticed this tendency to look and not see with my husband. We spend our days together, weaving in and out of each other's spaces, sometimes even speaking in passing without even looking at one another. I have made more of an effort of late to go into the living room, sit on the loveseat, and look at him before asking a question. It's such a simple thing with such a substantial impact- connection.
That's a precious gift we can bestow--to love someone by really seeing them. Thank you, Jen!