By Jenny Monahan, Director of Marketing and Communications
Perspective is everything.
As an English teacher, I tried to impress upon students that understanding an author’s point of view is critical to analyzing the writer’s argument effectively.
Any scientist knows that an object looks very different under a microscope than it does to the naked eye.
As artist and Dutilh member Carolyn Parker recently told me, the artist’s unique gift is an ability to notice visual details in a way that most people do not.
There’s a trippy scene at the end of Men in Black where the camera pulls back and the earth continues to shrink in size until it’s encompassed within a galaxy and then within a universe that is all just a small marble plaything for a larger lifeform living in some other universe.
How we view something matters, and certainly our different viewpoints have value and help to make the world an interesting place.
Richard Rohr is one of my favorite writers, and I’ve been working my way through his newest book, The Universal Christ. Rohr suggests that our human perspective is rather limited, and that God is calling us to try to see better – to see with eyes of love. Without love, our perspective is as limited as that MIB scene.
In John 8:12, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Referencing that passage, Rohr writes:
Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reason to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.
Isn’t that ironic? The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else.
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe. EPUB, Chapter 2. Convergent, 2019.
Rohr also makes the point that Jesus never asks us to worship him. Instead, he asks us to follow—or see like—him.
Seeing consistently through the lens of Jesus, with compassion and love, is no small task.
It’s so easy to watch the news and dismiss the people with whom we disagree as idiots, criminals, liars. With anxiety heightened during the pandemic, I struggled not to feel angry at people I perceived as ignoring scientific evidence. Those of us who have gone down the rabbit hole of engaging with a social media troll know that it’s difficult to see Jesus in someone who appears to be picking a fight and deliberately demeaning anyone who disagrees. Our day-to-day life presents so many opportunities for judgment, discord, and hatred.
Christ is calling us to choose to see differently.
If we rely on Jesus, the “light of the world,” as the light that illuminates everything else we see, that perspective can’t help but change how everything else appears to us. The ability to transform our perspective, according to Rohr—and to every other spiritual leader I’ve ever heard—is dependent on prayer, contemplation, reading the Bible, and practice.
Seeing through Christ’s eyes seems to be a matter of choosing to do so, and then choosing it again the next time. And the next time. And the next time. It’s a learned behavior, a skill we build and get better at the more we do it.
My prayer for each of us is that we may continue to strive to have the perspective of Christ—to see Christ in each other and in those we too often perceive as “other,” so that we can start to bring about the Kingdom of God here on earth, as it is in heaven.
Dutilh Church 