“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
—French philosopher Henri Bergson
For several years running, my sister and I played a little game to ease the boredom of our family’s four-and-a-half hour drive from West Texas for our Christmas visit to extended family in Southern Oklahoma.
The competition was to see how many Christmas trees were visible in homes adjacent to the two-lane route we traveled each year. Glenda took her side of the backseat; I took mine.
Since the drive meant passing through a host of small towns, we had plenty of occasions to spot lit trees in picture windows.
Years later, in my first post-seminary employment, I started a typesetting business that supported my work as an organizer focused on prompting advocacy within churches on issues related to hunger and food insecurity.
Ken Sehested
This was before the advent of desktop publishing. My work, using a photoelectronic typesetting machine, was to take the directives of design artists, key in the needed text in specified sizes and fonts, then processing the film, which the artists then cut and pasted on a layout board to create copy for printing.
In the process, my eyes learned to distinguish between dozens of different typefaces. Before long, I was spotting the names of fonts — Helvetica, Times, Cooper Black, Palatino — used in everything from billboards to television adds to all manner of printed material.
I would have paid little attention to such information had I not be required to train the eye.
You would be surprised what can be seen when the eyes are tutored to find certain objects and ignore others.
Some of the most intriguing scientific discovery in neuroscience comes from the study on how the brain actually works, particularly in the juncture with ophthalmology on how the eyes communicate with the brain: Sometimes accurately, but so many times giving illusory information and selective attention to reality. I understand but a thimbleful of this science; but its conclusions are easily comprehended in the ways that influence our lives.
That is to say, our eyes and brains can be trained to “see” certain things, ignore other things, alternately with prejudicial or preferable evaluation.
“Our eyes and brains can be trained to ‘see’ certain things, ignore other things, alternately with prejudicial or preferable evaluation.”
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh, a research professor at Dartmouth College and a senior fellow at Glendon College in Canada. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” Over time, neural pathways are created (or others neglected) which help us interpret the overwhelming amount of sensory information we are subject to every day.
“Our brains also unconsciously bend our perception of reality to meet our desires or expectations. And they fill in gaps using our past experiences,” writes Brian Resnick.
Marketing professionals have long employed the insights of “visual salience,” a carefully crafted arrangement of visual objects and wording whose purpose is to drive the viewers eyes to a prearranged point of emphasis.
Cognitive scientists John M. Henderson and Taylor R. Hayes write about “cognitive guidance theory,” which purports to demonstrate how a viewer’s context, life circumstances, and commitments serve as interpreters of what is experienced.
I recently wrote to a friend that it’s hard to simultaneously attend to the realities of history and to the promises of hope. Focusing only on history leads to the edge of despair. Emphasizing only hope creates a temptation to sentiment, to magical thinking, to imaging unicorns and juju beans.
As has been said, what you see is determined by where you stand; but also according to your constellation of values, the shape of your relational network, your relative willingness to go beyond patterns of comfort and familiarity, your material circumstances, the community in which you are embedded, the directional pattern of your attention, expectations about historical outcomes, and the ability to spot beauty in the background of humanity’s disfiguring outcomes.
As the author of Hebrews writes, faith is the assurance of things not seen — of reality not evident in the current arrangements of power and perceptional capacity. That is to say, not seen by the dominant culture, the ruling powers, the enforced economic values and practices, even the preeminent religious institutions.
“Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.”
As Walter Brueggemann has written, “Every imperial agent wants to reduce what is possible to what is available.” Living into Advent fosters an engaged eschatological perspective, whereby we are captured by a vision transcending current predicament.
The work of spiritual formation — an anchorage in the world but not of it — involves many things, including liturgy; participatory praise (the one who sings prays twice, according to Augustine); devotional habits; communal reflection on Scripture, its history of interpretation, including the lived experience of how its insights intersect with real world decisions; and daily practice of the works of tender mercy and a fierce advocacy for peace rooted in justice. Not to mention the seemingly futile (even irresponsible) commitment to the ultimate efficacy of nonviolent resistance to injustice.
These practices (among others) intersect, reinforce, correct and deepen life in the Spirit.
§ § §
“You’ll find out true
What mother said to you
That tears of god will show you the way
The way to turn.”
—Los Lobos, “Tears of God”
§ § §
Two ancient practices should be highlighted and expanded during Advent’s candle-lit observance.
One is referred to as “the gift of tears.” Much of the history of such practice is focused on the tears of penitence when we recognize our personal shortcomings, when our ignorance is exposed, when we realize the harm we have done and undertake the work of confession and reparation.
Biblical scholar Pamela Tamarkin Reis comments that Hagar, after expulsion into the desert with her son Ismael from Abraham and Sarah’s compound, was the first person in Torah (and thus in written history) to cry (Genesis 21). The text says God heard her cry, and that of Ismael, and sent an angel to their rescue from certain death.
“It is the misery of the dispossessed that sounds the alarm in heaven and echoes (if we have been trained to hear and see) in assemblies of faith.”
Later, in Exodus, the cries of the Hebrew migrant laborers in Egypt mobilized God’s attention and intervention. It is the misery of the dispossessed that sounds the alarm in heaven and echoes (if we have been trained to hear and see) in assemblies of faith.
A second maxim in early Christian mystical tradition is “the custody of the eyes,” referring to the intentional habit of diverting the eyes from temptation. This guidance has largely functioned to warn men regarding sexual lust — and thus was part of a larger platform of misogyny. Paradoxically, church authorities regarded this gift as too feminine, too hysterical, to be a reliable practice of spiritual devotion.
Nevertheless, practicing “custody of the eyes” can be a potent discipline in an age where marketing invades so much of our lives. Multiple studies claim the average citizen in the United States sees anywhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day. Maintaining custody of the eyes can put the breaks on addiction to social media, compulsive shopping and addictive fascination with scandals and bloody accounts of human misbehavior.
There is a proactive form of maintaining custody of the eyes: in everything from affirming the small successes of children, of attending to and passing along stories of courage and generosity, performing random acts of kindness to strangers, and seeing beauty that is beyond purchasing power, and digging for alternative sources of reliable news untold, or mis-told, by commercial media.
§ § §
“The facts of this world seen clearly
Are seen through tears
Why tell me then
there is something wrong with my eyes?”
—Margaret Atwood
§ § §
Like all wise spiritual instruction in fruitful practices, over the years such teaching is subject to decay and manipulation. The corrective interrogation that must be carried out in every age is this question: Does commitment to practices like the gift of tears and custody of the eyes lead practitioners into redemptive engagement in, and proximate compassion with, the pain and sorrow of the world?
The Psalms and prophets are saturated with texts of God’s special passion for the dispossessed. So, too, in the Gospels, Jesus was constantly associating with those considered disposable by the existent dominion. The insistence of God’s “preferential option for the poor” is now deeply imbedded in Catholic social teaching.
“Heaven has a warning light triggering urgent response to the Earth’s weeping.”
In Hebrew Scripture, the root word translated in English as “mercy” is associated with the bowels, even the womb. What a fertile image — reminiscent of that complaint in Deuteronomy, “You forgot the God who bore you,” a profound feminine and incarnational theme. Heaven has a warning light triggering urgent response to the Earth’s weeping.
The Spirit always stirs. But she also disturbs.
Compassion is not disengaged sentiment or kindly feeling. It is literally a “suffering with.” According to the Apostle Paul, “for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him, but also suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29). To be sure, God neither desires nor wills your trauma, much less your martyrdom. But God does invite all into the realm of grace from which we see our own security, our own welfare, our own salvation as linked to that of others, most especially the least, the last and the lost. A beatific vision is requisite for the work of reraveling the unraveled order of creation.
And what is the “sake” of Jesus? Most concisely, it comes as the conclusion of his apocalyptic fable in Matthew: “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.”
Recall the forecast projected by Mother Mary in her doxology: The “Mighty One” has “brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly; filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. It is a song of seditious piety, and several times in the 20th century repressive governments forbade its public recitation.
Notice the messianic evidence Jesus recited when John the baptizer (then in prison and growing impatient with Jesus’ lack of revolutionary success) sent his disciples to ask, “Are you the one, or should we wait for another?” His response wasn’t a first-person rendition of the Chalcedon Creed. It was simply this: “Go tell John what you have seen: the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; those with a skin disease are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; the poor have good news brought to them.” It is Jesus’ most expressive Christological summary.
“The most common way we take Christ out of Christmas is by postponing the Spirit’s redemptive work … to some disembodied, ethereal, and vacuous future.”
If the cries of the poor fail to reach our ears, if the despoiled remain out of sight, if the tortured treatment of people and creation itself — Adam and Adama alike — fails to moisten our cheeks and mobilize our feet in response, then the gift of tears and the custody of the eyes, and all manner of veneration practices, are merely forms of distraction and conceit designed to conceal unregenerate hearts.
The result immunizes us from the pain of the world — and thus apostasy. We are left practicing no agency, responding to no obligation, adhering to no covenant tie. We are subject to reinforced, self-centering pretense. The most common way we take Christ out of Christmas is by postponing the Spirit’s redemptive work (and our own enlistment in such work) to some disembodied, ethereal, and vacuous future.
§ § §
“The tamed piety of the conventional church wants an innocent baby who comes gently into our secure lives and keeps everything benign and friendly. … Advent is about both hope and hurt; pain and risk, as well as excitement and joy, are part of the adventure.”
— Kyle Childress
§ § §
I still love the extravagant lights of the Christmas season. As a young adult, taking my family to my parents’ home for Christmas deep in the bayous of South Louisiana, we often drove to New Orleans for a slow drive through City Park, whose massive, majestic oaks were spectacularly adorned in lights. For several years we also traveled to St. James Parish, north of New Orleans, to watch the annual Christmas Eve lighting of 100 or more bonfires strung for miles atop the Mississippi River levee.
“Santa’s delivery is not like that of Mary’s.”
Such delight is to be relished, and every life deserves a bit of extravagance. But Santa’s delivery is not like that of Mary’s. The first Advent was marked by danger, political intrigue, fright-inducing angelic appearances, the sheer pain of the birth canal’s turmoil and a tale of mass murder.
“I do not see any blood or placenta in our Christmas card scenes,” Julia Goldie Day wrote recently, referencing her own birth experiences. Having been present for the births of my two children and three grandchildren, I cannot read Nativity stories without hearing Mary’s travail; and I find laughable that familiar carol’s claim that “little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” The texts themselves neglect mention of the inevitable spillage of the severed umbilical cord; nor how soiled diapers were cleaned; nor the possibility of Mary’s postpartum blues.
Moreover, we rarely notice the subversive backdrop to the Incarnation tales. It was no coincidence the Gospel writers chose words like “Lord,” “Savior,” “Son of God,” and “Prince of Peace” to narrate the portent of Jesus’ birth. These exact same terms also were used of the great Caesar Augustus, ruler of the Roman Empire during that period.
These narratives are evidence of the serious ideological conflict between the contrasting visions pitting the reign of God against the world’s oppressive rule.
All of which is to say, Advent’s backdrop is shrouded in a heavy fog of agony. This is why many traditional Advent hymns are minor-keyed. This is one of the difficult lessons for the believing community to incorporate in our liturgy.
“Joy to the World”? Yes, yes, most certainly. But not by way of jingle bells and white Christmas dreams. Joy’s outbreak is always contested. Our carols are often muffled.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” in his Christmas Day 1863 “Christmas Bells” poem, later turned into a popular carol, written in the middle of the U.S. Civil War. Yet this verse has been suppressed in our hymnals: “Then from each black, accursed mouth, the cannon thundered in the South. And with the sound, the carols drowned, of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
§ § §
In Lynch v. Donnelly, a 1984 Supreme Court case upholding a 40-year-old tradition in Pawtucket, R.I., of erecting a city-sponsored Christmas display, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the majority’s approval of the practice, saying the scene “engenders a friendly community spirit” and “serves the commercial interests” of the merchants.
§ § §
After returning from three weeks in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team, shortly before the March 2003 U.S. invasion, I stayed in touch with my new friend Ed. Some years later, in the midst of a dangerous moment in U.S. politics unfolding during Advent, I closed one note to Ed with this line: “There is agony in the air, and we must listen for the sounds of angel wings” — referencing the multiple angelic visitations surrounding the birth of Jesus, all of which began with the heavenly heralds’ urging: “Don’t be afraid!”
Responding to my comment, Ed wrote: “Nor, alas, dare we ignore the flailing of devils’ tails.”
This is the missing context of our culture’s recalling the Yuletide tale, preoccupied as we are with shiny trinkets and Santa’s appearance. The original characters around Bethlehem’s birth story were distraught. Our Advent script is agonistic. Even now we hear Ramah’s wailing and lamentation. Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s infants is also part of the Christmas story, although it is excluded from the Revised Common Lectionary readings.
No less now than then, those devil tails still flail. The vigilant work of communities of faith is needed to nurture its members in the gift of tears and custody of the eyes. Advent’s agony is the context for comprehending the scandal of the Incarnation’s disclosure. Only through these and other capacities are we prepared to hear that “multitude of heavenly hosts” heralding Christmas’ illuminating joy, including our own unrestrained voices chanting jubilate Deo!
Ken Sehested is curator of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.