SEE FOR YOURSELVES
5 24 09
JOHN 1:29-42; 13:35; 17:21
GALATIANS 3:23-29
ANTHONY E. ACHESON, M.DIV.
Today’s passages have some important things to say about the emergence of right relations within the human community. The Book of Galatians announces the potential basis for a new, more harmonious social order in which, ‘there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,’ but in which we are all one. Jesus voices the same vision when he prays for the day when all humankind will, ‘love one another,’ [John 13:35;] and, ‘all be one’ [John 17:21.] These passages do more than state a theoretical ideal. They also articulate the deepest, driving desire of the human spirit for harmony within our own kind. And they carry seeds of hope that a vibrant state of unity can become an increasing structural reality within the human race.
The world around us, of course, shows how hard it is to achieve this. Unity is easy to extol. But how do we make it real, or, at the very least, move toward making it more real in the rough and tumble of actual living? One piece of the answer is reflected in today’s passage in the first chapter of John. When two men ask Jesus for more information about him and his work, he tells them that the best way to have their questions answered is to, “Come and see for yourselves.” He meets their curiosity not with a theoretical answer, or a mere verbal teaching. Rather, by telling them to, ‘come,’ he urges them to be proactive and take their own initiative. They need to be willing to shift off their accustomed spot so they can receive something new and different not only intellectually, but also experientially. When Jesus says, “Come and see for yourselves,” he is inviting them, first, to move both literally and figuratively; and then, secondly and more importantly, to open themselves to a direct personal awareness of the new reality he is offering.
The capacity to ‘see’ someone or something can seem deceptively simple. You might say, ‘It was good to see you at the recycling station yesterday morning,’ as one of you said to me before this morning’s service. But how much of a person do we really see when we see them? Seeing someone, really seeing a person, takes time and generally involves some real work. Anyone who has ever been involved in a marriage or a long-term relationship knows that truly seeing someone else can be very much a long-term project. Learning to read expressions and decipher body language; noticing when the muscles on someone’s face may be moving this time toward laughing, that time toward crying, such perceptions are far from automatic. When a person smiles, is it a smile of delight or is it a smile masking some kind of anger, or emotional pain? Seeing what is going on in a person’s face or life, seeing for ourselves, in Jesus’ phrase, often takes time and effort. Some forms of physical seeing may indeed happen automatically. It didn’t take any effort for my friend to recognize me at the recycling station yesterday, or for any of us to notice that the sky was gray when we came in the building this morning. Spiritual and psychological seeing, however, are not so simple. They require time and effort and need to be learned. Psychological and spiritual seeing require the discipline of attention. They require the discipline of sustained attention.
How do we learn to see beyond immediate surfaces? One important step is to become aware of the obstacles to accurate seeing. One frequent obstacle is our habitual use of mental shortcuts, especially our tendency to see people or situations around us in term of pre-existing categories and assumptions. Gender is one area this happens a great deal. We’ve all been socially programmed to see women and men in a different ways. Imagine, if you will, a reception taking place in the church’s Fellowship Hall. Suppose a situation comes up in which we may need to ask for some help. We might see a man and a woman in the kitchen. Which one will we ask to move around some furniture, or set up one of our long, heavy tables? Or, on another hand, which one would we be most likely to ask to start ladling the soup into some bowls? In many instances our automatic response might well be to ask the woman to serve and the man to lift.
The critical word here is ‘automatic.’ We would often make that choice because our minds had been conditioned to more likely see the men as furniture movers and the women as food servers. Would those be bad choices? Not necessarily. But it is important to notice…..it is important to have the ability to notice……what our pre-conditioned categories are when it comes to thinking about which person might do which job. When we fail to notice the ‘automatic-ness’ of our categories, and when we then proceed to act on that ‘automatic-ness,’ we are, in effect, letting programming from the past determine the ways we think and act in the present. In actual lived life, this is what determines most of our actions most of the time. But that is not our only option. When it comes to how we view people, we can also make use of Jesus’ suggestion to, ‘Come and see [them] for ourselves.’ We don’t have to ask the men to move the furniture because that is how we were conditioned [although in some cases that might be an appropriate choice.] We don’t have to follow any past programming that slots the women as serving the food [although in some instances that may also be perfectly agreeable.] We don’t even have to obey any more recent versions of programming to be politically correct and insist that the man serve and the woman lift. What is important is to be aware of why we make which choice, and have the freedom to choose either way. What is important is that that we don’t allow either past programming from family or culture, or the pressures or opinions of others in the present, to be the determining factor in how we see people in this here and now. The better, more freeing choice in how we perceive others is to, ‘Come and see for ourselves.’ The willingness and ability to ‘see’ our own mental processes enables us to make choices that are free and unencumbered by past conditioning and cultural pressure.
One of my clergy colleagues is a pastor in New Jersey. A few years ago one of her friends came to New York City for cancer treatment at Sloan Kettering Hospital. Once when she had to wait between appointments, rather than travel all the way home, this friend spent some required waiting time in the pastor’s apartment, which was on the third floor of the church complex. After spending a couple of hours there, she walked downstairs to return to the hospital. Just then, a longtime member of the church passed her walking up the stairs. In a moment of surprise and awkwardness, the passerby spoke to the guest who was leaving the apartment, and said, ‘O hello. Were you here to clean Pastor’s apartment?’
That was a strange question, wasn’t it? There were many other things she could have said. The passerby didn’t know the woman who had been using the apartment. She had no way of knowing that this woman happened to be a gifted guitarist and songwriter. She had no way of knowing that the visitor had graduated with honors from Girls’ High in Philadelphia and later from the Lutheran seminary in that same city. She had no way of knowing that that woman walking down the stairs happened also to be a caring and skilled pastor, and a passionate preacher. So why did that church member think that her minister’s guest might have come to clean the apartment? Well, by now you may have guessed that the visitor in addition to being a pastor also happened to be a black woman. This is a kind of experience that black people have all too often in this culture. In this instance, the comment appears not have been intentionally unfriendly. But to the black woman who was on the receiving end, it must have hurt to hear it.
The comment, quite clearly, came from a set of preexisting categories about where other people fit into the social fabric. Jesus said, ‘Come and see for yourselves.’ A moment ago, we noted that seeing accurately can be a hard work, and that because of that, most of us develop shortcuts. We put things into categories, and then if something resembles what is already in that category, we are quick to mentally locate that someone or something into that pre-existing category. I’m guessing that the woman who thought the visitor on the stairs might be a cleaning woman, may well have had an image from childhood associating black women and cleaning. When I was a child, my mother hired a cleaning person from time to time. As it turns out, it was usually a black woman who came to do that work. This memory helps me understand how someone’s mind might have made a snap associating a black woman with cleaning. But even though the question, “Were you cleaning the pastor’s apartment,” may have been innocent on one level, it nonetheless had the potential to cause hurt. And whenever there is the potential to cause hurt, our words and deeds take on a moral dimension. In this instance, the question, ‘Are you here to clean the pastor’s apartment,’ reflected a form of mental laziness that became hurtful. The person who asked that question had apparently not yet become willing to do some important pieces of what we might call, ‘consciousness work.’ She had not yet become willing to examine her own habitual mental categories by which she slotted other people’s social roles. She was using a mental shortcut by which it was easy and convenient to explain who someone was. She saw a black woman leaving an affluent apartment occupied by a successful white person, and came to the mental conclusion: this could be the cleaning lady.
Shortcuts like this are common mental habits that have been implanted in our minds by culture and upbringing. But in this case, the mental shortcut became hurtful. As is frequently the case with mental shortcuts, this one did not result in more, or more accurate, seeing. It clearly produced less, and less accurate seeing.
When Jesus was asked by the two men who saw him, “Where are you staying?, he told them, “Come and find out for yourselves.” When this black pastor in New York was asked, “Are you a cleaning woman,” she might also have replied, “Why don’t you come and find out for yourself, rather than relying on a pre-existing mental category.” In this incident the woman who asked if the other one was a cleaning woman, appears to have not yet done the hard work of seeing for herself. She had not yet done the hard work of learning the difference between seeing, accurately, in this moment; and failing to see because of relying on mental shortcuts that so often lead us to misperceive rather.
This anecdote can help us recognize that both psychological health, AND good character, AND a well-functioning society, are all profoundly rooted in how well we see, and in doing the hard work of learning to see rightly. It is hard work to become aware of what ideas and associations our families and cultures have placed in our psyches. It is hard work to decide which of those ideas and associations to weed out and which to cultivate. It is hard work to make a regular, daily, practice of monitoring, sifting and shifting what takes place in our minds habitually. But it is work worth doing because this, precisely, is the most fundamental work of the spiritual life.
At its deepest levels, the spiritual life is most essentially a process of, first, watching and, then, choosing what goes on in our minds. Every human action originates in a thought. There are no exceptions to that basic reality. But when we grasp that foundational fact, we are able to understand that the basis of both moral life and spiritual growth always and inescapably emerges from working with consciousness. All spirituality is working with consciousness. The spiritual invitation always begins by saying, ‘Come and see for yourselves,’ which also could be stated, ‘Come and be conscious for yourselves.’ The only way to make truth our own is to do the hard work of, first, coming toward it proactively; and, second, appropriating it for ourselves. May this be a day and week in which we come to see that more and more, and make it increasingly real in our daily practice.
