By Cordelia Fitzgerald
Have you ever played Magic Eye? You know, those strangely pixelated and patterned pictures that you’re supposed to stare at and cross your eyes and twist your brain until you can’t see the 3D image everyone claims is there? I have. And a good many tries into it, I (sort of) figured it out. Sometimes I stare at the image for minutes and give up, and sometimes the athlete or frog or airplane springs out at me before I’ve even started. What I had finally learned was that peculiar combination of relaxing one’s eyes and looking at nothing in particular to gradually let the image deepen into focus. I had to change my perspective, and it was hard.
While changing perspective isn’t always that difficult, it does usually come with at least one effortful push. Take hummus. I have always hated hummus. I don’t like beans, their cousins or their distant relations, and I don’t like their texture in anything. Not even black bean brownies. Chickpeas count as beans in my book. My mother loves hummus, and, dutiful child that I am, I would always taste it, despise the smooth yet bean-y texture, hate the weird tang that always came off as the strongest flavor, and smile and say, “Not my favorite.” Then one day my Lebanese coworker brought in homemade hummus and insisted I try it, which I did for politeness’ sake. And it was definitely not store-bought. The nuttiness, clean taste, and freshly-made texture flew in the face of the formulaic, carefully contrived mass production that I was used to. Suddenly, I understood why people liked it. And strangely, when I tried the generic hummus again, I almost liked it; it came out of the hate column. Instead of all the bad qualities that were at the forefront before, I could take the taste experience from my coworker’s hummus and see and taste those qualities in the lesser version. The negatives just faded away.
In a like manner, how many people hate humanity because they’ve never encountered the “real thing”? The culture can often be bogged down in the nastiness and pettiness of everyday life, where the expectation exists that of course everyone will lie and be cranky and selfish. In this way, the “rules and restrictions” of organized religion, particularly Christianity, can seem to be rather like organized crime: an excuse and power structure that supports a person’s need to gratify his or her own desires. Moreover, it seems like a go-ahead to attack others from the safety of one’s own protective belief system (“Christians hate homosexuals!”).
Spoiler: Christians don’t hate homosexuals, or, if they do, they’re doing it wrong. Christians have (or should have) developed their magic eyes and put on the glasses of Christ to see humanity as He intends. They have, if you will, sampled the good hummus and can now pick out the good qualities in humanity. Sure, a homosexual (given he is consummating his desires) is not operating within the laws of the road – he is driving a schooner down the freeway. But – and here is the trump card – he is a beloved child of God, whose dignity and worth lie in that sonship rather than in his sins or weaknesses (or strengths!) or whatever else he claims as his identity. This one lies with another man – but God has given him life and extended the invitation to eternal bliss. That one murders – but she was given rational faculties in her birthright of God’s image. This family steals – but God has named them family as He named His own Holy Family.
And now, now, comes the very large caveat. We must see the beauty of God’s work in every individual, but we must also recognize the work of destruction. The murderer must be stopped, the thief judged, and the adulterer and homosexual shown the error of their ways. The killing of babies cannot continue simply because the perpetrators are children of God. In this way we recognize that, in a very weak analogy, store-bought hummus is not homemade.
To be able to see this, and begin to remedy it, we need the Magic Eye – God’s perspective. He created the universe, so He sees everything as it should be, properly. All philosophy, science, relationships – aren’t they all a journey to try to gain this perspective? And it’s ours to have, so long as we search for it in the right place: God. We gain this perspective by pursuing science for His greater glory, relationships with people seeking Him, philosophical contemplation of Him, and encounters with Him directly in His words and in Holy Communion. Only with His eyes can we hope not only to see the three dimensional loveliness of creation, but to also be a part of bringing that vision to fruition.
LogoSophia Magazine 