Look Twice

"…wherever one looks twice there is some mystery."

―Elizabeth Bowen,  "A World of Love"

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Dear Kate,

The trouble I have with travelling is that I am going to waste it.

I am afraid I will go through all the troubles just to stare at a stone or a roof overhang or an expression on a face instead of marveling at the "attractions" that should have been what attracted me to go around the world to pay tribute to (i.e. to take a selfie with).

That's why my idea of "travelling" has always been walking around town and looking at stones and roof overhangs or whatever, beauties that I can never exhaust.

Actually more like they are exhausting me.  They attracted me and demanded attention.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about vision, vision of human flourishing, vision of hope.  A "Jesus Vision," I called it, though I would never call it that to anyone else.  I am not a religious person: Jesus has put an end to that for me.

"…wherever one looks twice there is some mystery."

What in your life demands a second look from you?  And if you are to look twice at it, do you seek to find an established order, to perceive and understand it, which is, essentially, to objectify it, to control it, to use or disuse it, to find a good reason to worship, to ignore, to dismiss, or to desecrate it?

A long sentence I wrote just now, which is asking for a book-length exposition.  For now let's seize on the idea of objectification, seeing things and people as merely objects, and, in its extreme form (called radical secularism), the world as an all-inclusive, all-pervasive totality, obscuring all that is inscrutable.  Do that to a stone, you miss everything that's happening in your backyard.  Do that to human beings, we falsify them and make abstraction of the mystery that is their freedom and dignity.

In a radically secularized world, what we see is what we get: skin color, gender, "facts" about a person.  Often we could speak about freedom and dignity and in the same breath "historical facts" (and thus good reasons) to deny our perceived enemies of any.

The head of the statue of Egerton Ryerson is now on a spike, and why should anyone endure the trouble to see if we might not have been fair to him?  I don't know Ryerson.  Everybody says he is bad.  He's not my grandpa, not my brother, and I have no reason to expose myself to materials that I could otherwise ignore to eschew any unnecessary moral weight of this matter on my shoulders.  He's an object, on a spike.  And let's leave it at that.

To "know" a person is to love him more, this is how Jesus asks me to see the world.  I don't want to love Ryerson.  I want to stand in solidarity with the hated ones to hate him more, hate him better, hate him thorough.  The most I could do for him is to keep quiet.

"Most People Say They Plan to Spend More Time Consuming Entertainment Post-Pandemic," a study finds.  Like we can't tell that already by looking into a mirror every morning.  Things will blow over soon enough, everything.  We can't wait to engage in mutual objectification to sound agreeable again.  Let's travel together and look at stuffs, keep each other in prayers and selfies.

There is no vision if we don't want to look, let alone twice.

Yours, Alex