It’s All About Seeing

My husband and I have been married for thirty-one years. We have been known to tell people we have had twenty-eight wonderful years together. Gratefully, the stormy times never occurred in large chunks.

We were in one of the difficult spots. I had been seriously ill, complicated by the fact I had been unable to sleep. My face showed all the ravages of six sleepless weeks. When my husband called at noon to check on me, I started sobbing.

"Ed, I feel so awful. And I look a hundred years old. Every time I look in the mirror, it makes me feel so bad."

Now, my husband, a science teacher and practical to the core, responded, "Well, don’t look in the mirror." But, before I could throw the phone at the wall, he said something wonderful: "Look in my eyes. I love you and I think you are beautiful."

I suspect that until we are able to look into another’s eyes and see ourselves as beautiful we have no idea of how God loves us.

Society has taught us a terrible fallacy. We have all learned, somewhere along the way, that "love is blind." But we were also taught as children that God is love. If God is love and love is blind, then logic would dictate that God is blind. But we know that is not true. God is the only one who sees us as we truly are and still loves us more than we will ever be loved. Therefore, love cannot be blind. Infatuation may be blind; physical desire may be blind, but love is the only real vision there is.

St. John tells us: "No one has ever seen God, yet, if we love one another, God dwells in us."(1Jn 4:12) He is telling us the only way to make God visible, the only way God can truly be known, is in our love for each other. It is the same thing Jean Valjean is saying at the end of Les Miserables when he sings; "Remember, the truth that once was spoken, to love another person is to see the face of God."

To look with love is to "see." It is what we meant when we first told our friends we were "seeing" someone. It is what we meant when we said we could "see" ourselves together for the rest of our lives. It is what can so easily get lost along the way unless we are willing to remind ourselves daily of the words of the Fox in the Little Prince: "Only with the heart does one see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes."