Kids love playing peek-a-boo. My guess is that they like being discovered and seen, while knowing they can hide at will. For many adults, that’s the best of both possible worlds.
Living in a small town on the Eastern Shore is delightful. I enjoy knowing most of the people I see around St. Michaels. The familiarity of being known and recognized is always comforting except of course if I’ve done something bad. Then, in hours, everyone knows about it. It’s common knowledge here on the Shore that we best speak only kindly about others because they be the relatives of the persons we happen to be badmouthing. Still it’s nice seeing and being seen.
Outside the supermarket the other day I saw a friend coming out of the store. I’d not seen him in a while and I waved. He has difficulty with his eyesight and so I had to be closer before he saw me. He immediately greeted me with the universal salutation, “Good to see you.”
Sight and sound are things we never give a second thought except as our senses begin delivering them poorly. The significance that these senses have for our well-being becomes more compelling even as they grow more precarious.
A couple of years go my eyes were giving me a fit. I’d developed cataracts. I arranged to have them removed. Once the operation was over for about a week I began seeing the world again as I recalled it as a child; colors resumed vibrancy and wherever I looked now, instead of the lusterless patina and wooly edges surrounding everything, objects assumed a razor’s edge acuity. My world came alive.
A friend told me this story about how certain native Africans greet each other. Zulus in Africa have a unique salutation. Approaching someone they will say, sikhona; this means, “I’m here to be seen.” The other then replies, sawubona, which says, “I see you.” This closes the circle and the relationship is now engaged.
Greeting one another in this manner, people are far more inclined to look each other in the eye, an intimate gesture that suggests the openness and availability of one to the other. The exchange confirms that each takes the other very seriously as an individual without any antecedent prejudices and stereotypes.
The salutation belongs to a spiritual worldview the Zulus call “Ubuntu;’ a way they understand their world and their personal relationships to one another. The word translates into a variety of meanings, generally understood as compassion, mutual humanity, and kindness.
For Zulus, each person, through relationship, continues bringing the other into existence, validating one another’s being and affirming each other as fellow humans. The idea is similar to what John Donne expressed in his famous poem about our human solidarity;
No man is an island
entire of itself
Every man is a piece
Of the continent
A part of the main
This mindset becomes even more striking when considering how today distrust is so common to our daily lives. Beware of the stranger, we warn. Once we were urged to welcome the stranger because thereby we might be entertaining an angel unawares. Now we avoid strangers because we fear they’re potentially threatening.
To be known thoroughly is a level of spiritual joy rarely if ever achieved by human beings except in those moments when we feel particularly vulnerable. Then we become aware – and welcome that someone sees and knows who we are, what we’ve gone through, appreciates what we might be enduring at the moment, and for all that, cares for us. It is a precious awareness and a profound feeling of reassurance that offers comfort beyond words.
What demoralizes a child is less the physical pain they suffer than the feeling of having been ignored and not seen. The spirit of Ubuntu calls us to affirm and validate each other, to see and be seen with openness and wonder.
I came upon this remarkable account of Ellen Burstyn that dramatically illustrates the power that engaging people with our eyes can have. Ms. Burstyn is an 83-year-old actress. She grew up dirt poor in Detroit during the depression, and was regularly abused by her heavy drinking mother. She couldn’t wait to get out. She left on the day she was legally able, took a bus to New York. She carried two suitcases and had only three dollars.
She was a natural actress and worked herself up in the theater world to become an acclaimed character actress. Not surprisingly she was always fascinated with the idea she could be someone else.
After being successfully established professionally she decided to spend three days sleeping in a cardboard box on the streets of New York. What must this be like, she wondered? One day while she was living on the street she approached two women who sat eating outside a restaurant. She asked them for subway fare. One took a dollar from her purse and gave it to her.
Recounting her experience she makes this comment: “As I walked away I felt proud that I had gotten that. Yet I felt tears streaming down my face. Why? It was because she hadn’t looked at me.”
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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