Let's See

A few years ago, my dad gave me a newspaper article during Christmas break that he had found while I was away at school, and I have kept it since. It is a short piece (link) written by Garrison Keillor, and the wonder and loveliness of it have haunted me to this day, a sentiment no doubt woven with my quiet surprise at my dad having read and kept a writing that met me in such a real way. In the article, Keillor describes traveling on a bus in Manhattan during a chilled December night, sitting behind a couple he judged to be in their “early 20s:”

“She was a pale-skinned dark-haired beauty, perhaps an Egyptian film star, perhaps not, and the way she laid her head on his shoulder said that they were sweethearts, but he was so cool toward her, so blasé."

He didn’t kiss her once though she clearly wanted him to. I hear him say, ‘I was over at Larry’s when you called. Sorry I didn’t call you back.’ ‘What were you doing?’ she said. ‘Just hanging out.’ His hair was much nicer than a man’s hair should be. Too much time spent on that, and why would you hang around with Larry when you could be with her?”

This glimpse reminds me of how it is to return home from college after months spent away from home, away from the smell of my closet, a soft blend of laundry and old books, from the quiet murmuring of one of my parents talking on the phone downstairs, from the stairway that is so built into my muscle memory that I now only trip one out of fifteen times when skipping a step on the way up to my room. And, of course, the people: the smell of my dad’s aftershave as he hurries about a breakfasting kitchen, my mom leaving the nearly-finished Chicago Tribune crossword puzzle like a fresh footprint, my younger brother’s indecipherable grumblings chosen over distinct “yes’s” or “no’s” or “I’m at a tumultuous stage in my life and, though I desperately desire to relate with others, the effort is too much right now and you, family, will simply have to wait while I remain in my adolescent-cocoon.” These things I have grown accustomed to, that I see but don’t see, in all their humanness and loveliness and peculiarity.

I begin to wonder, What else am I growing accustomed to? What else is becoming familiar, so familiar that it annoys with its sameness, fulfilling the adage, “familiarity breeds contempt?” Why is it that we desperately desire to know, and be known, yet start to feel stale in our own home, in our own skin? Perhaps it is not so much new people or new places that we truly desire, but fresher, realer ways of seeing all that’s around us. Like Keillor,

“I don’t want to be like that young man, in the presence of magnificence and oblivious to it. His life has been too easy for him to understand what a miracle her love is. Mine has not.”

When we know love, it’s easy to forget what loneliness feels like - what homelessness might feel like because homelessness is the essence of loneliness - its weight and suffocation, how seems inexorable. It’s easy to forget our deep need for one another, for love, when we are with those people, and perhaps this is sometimes a good thing to forget. Yet, it is our quiet, or frantic, sufferings that remind us of all that’s inside calling out to love and be loved. This is a level worth connecting on, the realest level there may be. As Frederick Buechner writes, in his work "Adolescence and the Stewardship of Pain,"

“We are never more alive to life than when it hurts – never more aware both of our own powerlessness to save ourselves and of at least the possibility of a power beyond ourselves to save us and heal us if we can only open ourselves to it. We are never more aware of our need for each other, never more in reach of each other, if only we can bring ourselves to reach out and be reached."

If absence, longing, makes us realize our love for others, how can we live with this awareness of their beauty, of their loveliness and depth and humor and holiness? How can we not fall into well-worn paths of being with one another that, because of the familiar footfalls and cracks and ridges, blind people with a gauze of mundanity? We need constantly renewed eyes, hearts, as Jesus put it in Matthew 9.16,

“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

How then, to engage in this restoration? Far from a conclusive answer, Anne Lamott writes an idea that points toward this renewal in her book Bird by Bird:

“ [Good] books help us understand who we are and how we ought to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die. They [teach]…quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pat attention, and this is a great gift. My gratitude for good writing is unbounded. I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.”

I’m not sure if Jesus read literature, or if half of America even does. That’s not really the point, though. The point is learning to pay attention. To listen. To see others, really see them. I wonder if Adam and Eve had this problem of distraction or boredom before the Fall – probably not. It’s something we need to practice, to re-learn. We need wake-up calls. We need “eyes that see and ears that hear," and good art, good conversations foster this. What if we lived with the growing attentiveness to a God whose silence fills the earth: whose unspoken truth is everywhere, who came down to earth “delivering signs and dusting from their eyes,” as Sufjan Stevens sings? It is an ongoing pursuit, this awareness endeavor, and I wonder how much of it is us seeking to see something, and how much is grace-filled discovery. They mystery, however, is what pushes, lures, and tickles me onward.