How do you look? Have you checked? Caught a passing glance in a reflective storefront window or a long stare in the bathroom mirror?
But how do you look... at others?
In my last blog entry I introduced Anna Karenina to you as she sat on a train having illicit thoughts about a man. But what happened after that train ride? Tolstoy tells us that when Anna got off the train “the first person that attracted her attention was her husband. ‘Oh, my God! Why do his ears look like that?’ she thought” (Tolstoy 120). Really, ears? After that dramatic scene in a moving train this is what we get? Gary Morson points out this famous passage to draw our attention to the way Anna makes a tiny choice to see her husband in an uncharitable light. By beginning to see in this way she justifies her own guilt, so that it is his unattractiveness and not her unfaithfulness that dominates her mind. Morson writes, “The more she ascribes lack of feeling to [her husband], the more she comes to see him that way automatically” (84).
Do we do this? Do we make quick decisions about a person and then fixate on the negative in order to justify ourselves? How often do we pick people apart so we can feel better than them, not intimidated by them, or more justified in who we are? Have you ever stood in a grocery store line silently staring at magazine covers hoping to find a flaw in the beauty that shines on the glossy covers? Why do we delight when the powerful, the beautiful, or the rich mess up? Deep down do we revel in the failure or demise of those we envy? Or closer to home, how often do we criticize people in our lives or undermine their accomplishments so they do not threaten our own sense of ‘being better?’
Morson points out Anna’s reaction to her husband’s ears to show how the tiniest decisions we make about people are often quite ordinary. Usually we don’t condemn all at once, but bit by bit we adjust our perception of another, focusing on the negative, until we can justify our behaviors or thoughts toward them. Morson writes,
“We can look charitably or uncharitably. We can pay attention only to what is worst in a person; everyone possesses characteristics that can be seen as irritating or repulsive. Tolstoy wants to teach us that what we do at every moment of our waking lives-how we look and direct our attention- has supreme moral value precisely because it is so ordinary, precisely because it forms habits” (Morson 84).
How would our relationships change if we viewed others not with a critical eye to make ourselves feel better but with an eye to find the beautiful in them and rejoice in it?
Today, as you move through your day, how do you look? On what will you focus? That which makes you feel better about yourself by picking another apart? Or that which is truly unique and special about the person? Will you fixate on their faults and tear them down in your mind? Or will you seek to find the good to appreciate even if it means making yourself less?
Knowing we are loved by God and knowing that our brief little lives really DO matter in the eternal story of redemption gives us the freedom to rejoice in who God made others to be. Knowing that in Him we can see others with a more accepting love, we are free to be ourselves and love better. Those small little decisions we make about people affect the way we love them. His ears. Her voice. The way he does that. The way she always does this. Morson argues that “each uncharitable act of looking is a choice” (85).
Knowing that God, in His mercy, has looked upon us and made us beautiful in Him, we can see others with the same grace. How would our hearts change if we sought, by His grace, to look with an eye of charity. Might these charitable reads on people actually bring us closer to them?
So, how will you look?
