Purify the Gaze...
When I first began to read about postmodernism, with its notion that we are all locked in our own small perceptive worlds, fenced away from an objective reality that probably doesn't even exist, I was understandably shaken. To understand the implications of such an assertion is to come face to face with uneasiness at best, and at worst, despair.
But in the past several years, the idea that perception is partially creative on our end has become a welcome thought. "It's all in how we see things." "It depends on your perspective." How many times have we heard these statements? Evangelicals (myself included) have tended to see these tendencies as erosions of reality, indicators that truth was being lost, cosmic truth up for grabs. And on one end of the continuum, I agree. I'm not ready to sign up for a world without absolutes, with no capital "T" Truth. But having said that, I want to also say that I think there is a positive side to the pretty unarguable truth that we do indeed color our world with our attitudes, our preconceptions, our choice of filters through which to encounter the material and spiritual worlds.
How amazing is God to have given us the ability to encounter a single piece of stimulus from so many different perspectives? So He makes not only a world, and gives it to us: He makes a being that can experience that world in a near infinite variety of experience, and thereby we create alongside Him as we go. What staggering opportunity! What stunning responsibility! To see rain as oppressive gray, or as refreshing maker of green. To see 90 degree weather as envigorating or draining. To see a setback as defeat or delay of good. To see life's convergences as coincidence or Providence.
To see, to look, to gaze. These are creative actions in their essence. "The pure in heart shall see God." Recently, Dewitt Jones, a photographer for National Geographic who now travels the country delivering one of the finest and most inspirational lectures (Can I call it that? "Lecture" doesn't begin to capture it) I've ever heard. Obviously photographers have to learn to see, and he spoke of "the banquet being laid everywhere he looked."
How we choose to see creates the world all over again.
Nothing new, but striking me with new force...
8:09:16 AM
