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Barbara Newman, Northwestern University
Person to Person: Becoming Present
There may be few things in life that we take more for
granted than vision—until it fails us. In my case, that
happened early: I was born so nearsighted that I have worn
glasses since the age of eight and contact lenses since I
was fifteen. This summer, though, I had an extraordinary
experience. After decades of near-blindness, I had surgery
on both eyes—and now, suddenly, those lenses are a thing of
the past! No more groping blindly for a hotel bathroom in
the dark; no more fumbling with my contacts on a
transatlantic flight. I have been learning to see all over
again—a process that can be frustrating, that requires
patience and adjustment, but what joy! So, when Elena asked
me to speak at a conference about "learning to see," I had
to smile. For this process of acquiring new physical vision
is not unlike what I experienced more than thirty years ago,
when I first met Metropolitan Anthony and learned to see—a
little—with the eyes of Christ.
Our theme is one that was central to the bishop’s
teaching and practice: he had the gift not only to see with
God’s eyes, but to convey that vision, to make people
aware of it. Standing in his presence could be unnerving. An
encounter with him, even in private, always felt to me like
walking into a spotlight on a stage. Anyone who steps into
that circle of light will be brilliantly illumined—from
without and from within. There is no way to hide from that
light, no way to banish it, any more than by blinking we can
extinguish the sun. It is a true light, not a flattering one;
flaws do not vanish. Yet whatever it touches, it reveals as
beautiful. To stand in that light, seeing and being seen in
it, is a searingly personal experience. Yet in a different
sense, it is completely impersonal, for anyone at all would
have the same experience just by being on the spot. The
light does not shine because of any special quality in the
one who stands there, nor does it shine in spite of any. It
simply shines.
I do not think we can see with God’s eyes until, at least
once, we have had the experience of being seen with them. If
we are lucky, that happens in ordinary human love—between
friends or lovers, between parent and child. But the ability
to see everyone in such a way—not just our dearest
friends or people we admire, but everyone, from the
screaming infant to the dangerous enemy—that is both a
discipline and a gift. Like every gift of the Holy Spirit,
it is given freely, but we first have to ask for it—and show
with our whole life how much we long for it. How then do we
learn to see?
First, if we are Christians, we know the Incarnation is a
lens provided by God himself—a precise way to focus divine
light so we can see it, to filter God’s light so we can bear
it. Through this lens alone, we truly see God and the world.
So many other lenses obstruct our eyes, like grimy windows
or distorting mirrors, that we are not even aware of them.
First there are the lenses of sheer self-interest. Looking
through those glasses, I see that I am the center of the
universe, and other people matter only insofar as they can
help or harm me. This is the devil’s vision—and if we want
to see truly, we have to resist it every day of our lives.
But there is also a lens of convention, "the way of the
world," that frames our vision so we can see who matters and
who doesn’t. Rich people matter; beautiful, well-dressed
people matter; powerful people in important positions
matter. Crazy and unpleasant people, invalids, poor people,
refugees, people in distant corners of the world, do not
matter—so we do not need to see them or pay attention to
them at all. These, however, are the very people to whom
Jesus came and still comes. All those distorting lenses,
which fit our fallen eyes so conveniently, are polished each
day by mass media and advertising. So learning to see
requires us to tear ourselves away from every form of vision
that magnifies our self-importance, appeals to our desires
for prestige and power, or reinforces our sense that money
talks louder than truth.
Only through the Incarnation do we truly see God. If
Jesus was the incarnate Son of God—"light from light, true
God from true God"—then as Christians, we can never see God
apart from Jesus. Bishop Anthony was stunningly clear
on this point: if we still think of God in terms of absolute
power, apart from humility and sacrificial love, we have at
best a kind of Old Testament Christianity. (By this I do not
mean Judaism. The Old Testament offers us a raw, often
frightening vision of God’s power; but that is qualified by
the Talmud and centuries of Jewish wisdom and holiness, just
as it is by the New Testament.) Christ said that what we
do—or neglect to do—for "the least of these," his brothers
and sisters, we do for him. In this context, not to
see God among the most vulnerable means not to see
him at all, because that is where he chose to take his
stand. This has implications for our politics, but also for
the Church and its hierarchy. In one of his talks, the
bishop memorably remarked that the Church is not a pyramid,
as we often think, with the bishops and prelates forming a
narrow layer at the top and the ordinary faithful at the
bottom. Rather, it is an inverted pyramid: the
faithful are on top and the bishops have the lowest place of
all, because they are the slaves whose task it is to bear
the weight of the whole [1]
Only through the Incarnation do we truly see the world.
Christ was and is double, fully God and fully man. Like him,
we all exist here and now, in our messy human reality, but
we also exist in eternity—as the perfected, glorious selves
we shall become if God grants us to attain the resurrection.
To see with the eyes of Christ is to see both at once, the
divine beauty and the complicated work-in-progress that each
one of us is—and I know that Bishop Anthony could do that,
because he saw beauty in me when I myself saw only
weakness and confusion. To see in Christ means to see other
persons as images of Christ, as possessing infinite depth
and value. But here we may need to think more deeply about
what a "person" is. So I want to say a few words about the
bishop’s place in a major theological movement of the
twentieth century—the tradition known as personalism,
which characterizes the best of modern religious thought.
I am struck by a remarkable coincidence between Bishop
Anthony’s life and that of the French Catholic theologian,
Jacques Maritain. As a young student in Paris, Maritain
despaired of finding any meaning in life beyond materialism.
So he and his fiancée, Raissa, made a pact that if they did
not succeed in their quest for meaning after one year, they
would both commit suicide [2]. That must have been the temper of
the times because, as I’m sure you know, the young André
Blum made the same vow when he was a student in
Paris. Fortunately, God intervened and none of them had to
kill themselves! Like Bishop Anthony, Jacques and Raissa
Maritain turned to Christ. All of them were influenced by
the Russian religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, who had
also espoused personalist philosophy. Berdyaev maintained
that there is a profound difference between the mere
individual and the person, who is created in the image of
the Holy Trinity. In Slavery and Freedom, he wrote,
"Man is a personality not by nature but by spirit. By nature
he is only an individual [3]." What Berdyaev meant by an
"individual" is something like Leibniz’s monad, a
self-contained enclosure without windows or doors. As a
secular philosophy, individualism aims at
self-actualization, rather than mutuality or love. While it
may respect the rights of others, it regards the individual
as an autonomous self whose goal is to achieve his own
happiness. Persons, on the other hand, flourish only in
relationship to other persons: they exist on the model of
the three divine Persons, as "the Father is in the Son and
the Son in the Father." Living in mutual relation, Berdyaev
writes, the person "enters into infinity, and admits
infinity into itself; in its self-revelation it is directed
towards an infinite content." [4]
Personalism is a happy mean between individualism, which
elevates the lone individual’s desires above the needs of
others, and collectivism, which crushes the individual
beneath the weight of society. A goal of personalist thought
is to contemplate the human being from within, as a free
moral agent living in voluntary communion with others,
rather than a member of some category such as workers,
voters, or consumers. Another important figure in this
tradition was the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who
famously stressed the importance of I-Thou
relationships. If materialism allows us to treat the other
as an object that we can manipulate—an "it" rather than a
"you"—personalism demands that we regard each person as a
subject like ourselves, respecting the dignity and the
uniqueness of every human creature. For Buber, any "I" who
says "Thou" to another must be present as a whole self to a
whole self. This is true above all of God, the eternal Thou,
who sustains all relationships and is knowable only through
dialogue and presence. Gabriel Marcel, a French Catholic
theologian, shared this perspective. He emphasized the moral
goal of disponibilité, or becoming so emptied of
ourselves that we are always available to the
other—available to see, to love, and to give. It was Marcel
who insisted, against absurdist philosophers like Jean-Paul
Sartre and Albert Camus, that the opposite of absurdity is
love; this alone reaches beyond the death of the body into
the eternal. Bishop Anthony liked to quote the line of a
character in one of Marcel’s plays: "To love any person is
to say, ‘you will never die.’ [5]" In Russia, Nikolai Lossky
drew on personalist ideas in developing his concept of
sobornost, or mystical communion in the Church.
The Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyla taught ethics at the
University of Lublin, but is better known today as Pope John
Paul II—soon to be canonized. During his papacy he applied
personalist thought to the relationship between man and
woman, which was also the subject of an important series of
talks Bishop Anthony gave in 1989.
Father Anthony never thought of himself as a scholar and
rarely cited sources for anything he said. He presented
himself as a simple monk, not a theologian. But we should
not forget that he was well-read in many languages and
familiar with modern religious thought, as well as the
Church Fathers. Setting him within the personalist tradition,
which he would have encountered everywhere in
mid-twentieth-century Paris, helps us to contextualize his
work, to see him in the light of a broader movement of the
Holy Spirit in the modern Church. In the 1950s and 60s the
bishop was also active in ecumenical work. For instance, he
often spoke to the young people who gathered at the French
ecumenical monastery of Taizé, founded by Brother Roger—a
Protestant holy man who died a martyr in 2005. Bishop
Anthony had many spiritual sons and daughters at Taizé. In
the 1950s he even spoke at a seminary in my home town of
Evanston, Illinois—but I was a small child at the time, so I
wasn’t there! It is important to place his teaching in an
ecumenical as well as a Russian Orthodox context, because
his work for Christian unity was an important spur to his
theology of encounter. How could it not be? Ecumenical work
involves meeting the other face to face and seeking common
ground where only discord appears at first—and if you ever
heard the bishop speak about the Roman Catholic Church, you
know that for him, the divisions were very real. So I take
my first quotation on "learning to see" from an address he
delivered for Christian Unity Week in 1970.
If you think of one single day, how many people
have crossed your path, how few have [you] looked at
and seen? We run into each other, we cross one
another’s path—we do not see each other. We must
learn—and this is a training in inner discipline, in
human attention, in concern—we must learn to look
at every person who crosses our path, to look
and see the features, the expression in their eyes,
take in the whole person. And then how often it will
happen that a perfect stranger will move us deeply
by the anguish there is in his face, the fear, the
insecurity, or on the contrary the joyous fragrance
that emanates from him. … Indifference sees nothing,
hatred sees caricatures; only love can see the
beauty of an ugly face, the image of God shining
through the ugliness and the pollution.
[6]
Seeing, then, begins with looking—with a simple will
to see. It is like Buber’s I-Thou relationship, like
Marcel’s practice of disponibilité. In a sermon on
gratitude, the bishop specified that this "demands an inner
effort of self-denial, of forgetfulness of self, the
ability to see, to experience, to wonder in amazement."
[7]
Forgetfulness of self—one of those pious Christian phrases,
so easy to say, so difficult to do! Let me say more, because
in order to begin seeing, we need to be more deeply aware of
the reasons we fail to see. Aside from the issue of
prejudice that I mentioned earlier, there is simply our
chronic self-absorption. We are in a hurry, we have other
things on our minds, we see these same people every day, so
why bother to look? Alternatively, we may never see them
again, so why bother to look? Routine is another scourge.
When I go to the doctor’s office, the nurse is so busy
asking questions and recording what I say in her computer
that she forgets to look at me, and if I want to talk about
my actual problem, I feel almost rude. Or a student comes to
my office with questions about the final exam, questions I
have heard many times before; so if I am not careful, I too
forget to look.
The wonders of technology can help us encounter the
other; I cannot count all the email exchanges I had with
Elena before making my way to Moscow! But technology can
also stand between us and reality. Take the camera—a perfect
example of the double-edged potential of technology.
Photography can be a true way of seeing, capturing the
essence of a face or the finest angles of a building—but it
can also be a way of not seeing. A few years ago,
visiting the great church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople,
I spent about half an hour gazing at the mosaic of Christ in
the gallery. During that time, I would estimate that three
dozen tourists came along, snapped photos with their cell
phone cameras, and went their way without ever looking.
This strikes me as a metaphor for what we so often do,
creating instant "memories" and taking them as more real
than the event in the present moment. A new obstacle to
seeing has arisen since Bishop Anthony’s time, and that is
the plague of scripted encounters mediated by technology. In
America, at least, electronic devices not only enable, but
often demand this substitution of rote conversations for
real ones. Nowadays you can telephone anyone from the bank
to the airline, and you will hear a mechanical voice saying,
"This call may be recorded for quality assurance." What does
that really mean? As our friend Edward Snowden has revealed,
it means that Big Brother is always listening, or at least
he might be. But even if he’s not, it means a supervisor is
listening to make sure the agent doesn’t depart from her
script, risking a real conversation that could go in
unpredictable directions. Under such conditions, no true
listening or seeing is possible. The person has vanished,
replaced by an individual who is only a cog in a machine.
Sometimes, then, learning to see will mean being
subversive, deliberately refusing to play by the rules.
Bishop Anthony did this all the time, cutting across pious
and polite expectations to ask an honest question. It was
impossible to compliment him by saying, "Oh, what a
beautiful sermon you gave last week!" because instead of
replying "thank you so much," he would look you in the face
and ask, "So what have you done about it?" If you tried to
weasel out of embarrassing details in confession by saying
you had broken every commandment, he would confront you and
ask why you were lying to God. And he must have deeply
shocked the delegates at the World Council of Churches in
New Delhi, 1961, when he "protested because one of the
documents began with the words ‘guided by the Holy Spirit’
and then went on from one desperate platitude to another."
He asked the assembly to remove those words, saying, "why
should we accuse the Holy Spirit of all the inanities that we have put into this document?"
[8] The bishop had no
tolerance for lies or evasions. He had learned to find
"truth in the inward being and wisdom in the secret heart,"
as the psalm puts it. If he often seemed to know his
spiritual children better than we knew ourselves, it was
because he could see beneath the surface where, for the time
being, we might find ourselves stuck.
For a few years after I left London for America, I kept
up a correspondence with Bishop Anthony. At one point I
found myself in trouble because, out of empathy for a
mentally troubled friend, I came close to having a nervous
breakdown myself. I wrote to him about this and he replied
with some very specific advice about seeing:
In order to see, whether it is a human face or a
[work] of art, one must find the right distance (which
varies with one’s sight). If you are too far, you
discern only contours and miss the detail; if you
come too near, you may miss the object altogether—see
no statue, but only the stone; see no painting, but
only paint and canvas. So is it also with human
relationships: coming too close, clinging, holding,
does not allow us to see the other, but—at best ‘us’,
the two ‘blended together’, or more often, ourselves
reflected in the other. … [We may] allow another
person to invade us psychologically while we are in
the delusion that, by doing this, we carry the other
person’s burden. In reality, we deprive the other
person of our own otherness and of the help which a
confrontation with it could bring. [9]
Much of the time, we fail to see because we are too
distant; but in intimate relationships, we are often too
close. Thus we lose the detachment, the critical distance,
that is an essential element of love. This was a hard lesson
for me to learn, and I suspect it is one that will require
the rest of my life to discover.
True seeing, like prayer, has everything to do with a
certain quality of presence. In prayer we may feel that God
is absent, sometimes for years on end. But our theology
tells us he is present always and everywhere, for if he were
not, the world would cease to exist. Rather, we ourselves
are the absent ones—and this is also true in our encounters
with others. Bishop Anthony observed that much of the time,
we are at best half-present, we half-listen, while another
part of our mind is thinking about a dozen other things. So
common is this failure of attention that real presence, when
we do experience it, can be shocking. Let me quote from
Gillian Crow’s biography of the bishop, for she describes an
impression that I suspect all of us have felt:
There was an inner stillness about him that
produced a certain sense of spiritual awe, but this
complemented rather than opposed his warmth and
openness. . . . Metropolitan Anthony always aimed to
give of himself one hundred per cent, and this
included his total attention and commitment to
whomever he was speaking. His piercing gaze and his
perceptive and invariably encouraging words
contributed to the impression that speaker and
hearer were inseparably held in the hand of God, and
that the person’s concerns were the only things that
mattered to him. He never listened with one eye on
the clock or half a mind on what he was going to say
next. Since this is not what commonly happens in
human communication—it takes training and determined
effort to stop intrusive thoughts—it was a startling
experience. [10]
Words like discipline, training, effort, attention,
self-denial, have run throughout this talk. It will
surprise no one if I recall that Bishop Anthony was a monk,
that he was able to make himself so translucent to God’s
love only by virtue of his intense ascetic practice. But let
me give another example, this time a secular one that might
shock you in a different way. A woman named Marina Abramovič
presented a work of performance art for three months in the
spring of 2010, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She
called her work "The Artist Is Present." Every day, for
seven and a half hours, Abramovič sat on a chair in a
gallery, with spectators seated nearby behind a rope. Anyone
who wished—and arrived early enough—could sit in another
chair opposite hers for as long as he or she liked. All day
long Abramovič did not rise from her chair. Clad in a long
robe, she did not speak, eat, drink, or move her body; she
simply gazed at the one who faced her, fully present. Men,
women, and children came and went. Often those who sat with
her reported that they lost all sense of time; they had
intended to sit for only fifteen minutes, but wound up
staying an hour or two. Many had deep spiritual experiences.
They felt their breathing change, their bodies becoming
relaxed yet alert, as in prayer; they knew themselves to be
loved. Some wept or entered into trance or had visions; at
least one had a telepathic conversation with Abramovič.
Almost all who came with an open mind remarked that "something
happened," something they had not expected and could not
easily describe. [11]
"The artist is present." If you think what Abramovič did
was easy, try doing it for just one hour! She has had, in
her own way, an intense ascetic training. Performance art
uses the artist’s body as its medium, and in previous works,
Abramovič has stabbed herself with knives, set herself on
fire, and posed with serpents; once she lay naked and
bleeding on a cross of ice. If you saw photos, you might
find these works to be obscene. Nevertheless, here is a
woman who has tamed her body, making it transparent to the
spirit. I have no idea if she is a believer, though I know
that her great-uncle Varnava was Patriarch of the Serbian
Orthodox Church. What Abramovič delivered, during her three
months of being-present, was a concentrated version of what
Hindus calls darshan, the unmitigated loving gaze. A
few Indian holy men and women are famous for this practice
and travel around the world offering it to their devotees.
So great is the power of presence, of simple seeing—and so
great is the hunger for it in our distracted world.
To conclude: vision of that kind requires that we be
present, not just as individuals going about our business,
but as free persons, unscripted, without expectations. It
demands that we strip from our eyes the distorting lenses of
convention, self-interest, and routine. It asks us to draw
near, to risk intimacy, yet without sacrificing the critical
distance that keeps us honest. It can occur only when we
give our full attention instead of "multi-tasking," as our
hurried world prefers. And of course, no act of seeing takes
place without light. For when we truly look at the other, we
also look toward God, whose presence may shine through us
whether we know it or not. I used to wonder, when I saw
Christ gazing at me from Bishop Anthony’s face, if he was
aware of it. Was he at that moment in a state of exalted
prayer, or just doing his human best and leaving the rest to
the Holy Spirit? I will never know. But if I had dared to
ask, I think he would have said our emotional states do not
matter. God asks only our will, our obedience; the rest is
not our concern.
NOTES:
[1] Metr.
Anthony of Sourozh, sixth forum talk on the theme of “Man
and Woman,” London, 26 June 1989; quoting Archimandrite
Sophrony of the monastery of St. John the Baptist,
Tolleshunt Knights, Essex. Typescript (personal copy).
[2]
Donald DeMarco, “The Christian
Personalism of Jacques Maritain,” Faith and Reason,
Summer 1991; online at
http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/FR91201.HTM.
[3] Nicolas
Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 21.
[4] Ibid.,
22.
[5] “Aimer
un être, … c’est dire: toi, tu ne mourras pas.” Gabriel
Marcel, Homo Viator: Prolégomènes à une métaphysique de
l’espérance (Paris: Aubier Éditions Montaigne, 1944),
194.
[6] Metr.
Anthony of Sourozh, “Encounter,” address for Christian Unity
Week, London, January 1970. Typescript (personal copy).
[7] Metr.
Anthony of Sourozh, sermon on gratitude, Ennismore Gardens,
December 1981. Typescript (personal copy).
[8]
Third Assembly of the World Council of
Churches, New Delhi, 1961, as reported in Metr. Anthony of
Sourozh, “Our Relationship with the Three Persons of the
Holy Trinity,” trans. Esther Williams; address given in
Fribourg, 1970. Typescript (personal copy).
[9] Metr.
Anthony of Sourozh, personal correspondence, 5 August 1984.
[10]
Gillian Crow, ‘This Holy Man’: Impressions of
Metropolitan Anthony (London: Darton, Longman and Todd,
2005), 196-97.
[11]
Marina Abramovič, The Artist Is Present, documentary
film (2013); Marco Anelli, Portraits in the
Presence of Marina Abramovič (photographs), 2010;
Yazmany Arboleda, “Bringing Marina Flowers,” Huffington
Post Blog, 28 May 2010; “The Honor of Witnessing Marina
Abramovič,” at
James Westcott, When Marina Abramovič Dies: A Biography
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).
