Our Desire To Be Seen
“Look at me somersault, mommy! Look at me jump! Look what I can do with whipped cream, mom.”
“Look at me.”
From the time my children began talking, they were beckoning me to look at them. I learned swiftly they desired more than being seen. They desired to move me. They hungered for a positive response.
If I didn’t respond to what I was seeing, they continued inviting/demanding until I responded. For them—looking would naturally flow into a positive response. They knew they were seen when my seeing them evoked a response. This experiment of an interchange between a mother and her infant is a haunting display of a child’s imprinted need for her caregiver to not only see her but respond to her.
Even as adults, my children still beckon my gaze. Sometimes with a verbal invitation. At other times, they act out with behaviors they know will snag my attention. They love being seen by me. They are enlivened when they move me.
If anything in our world affirms our human hunger to be seen, it is the 3.78 billion social media users. Billions of people longing to be seen, to be counted, to measure their impact on their viewers. Our desire is holy. Yet sometimes the strategies we use to be seen are not. We can easily prostitute ourselves to win the gaze of another.
There doesn’t seem to be an age limit or window on our desire to be seen. Some of us have learned to kill that desire because being seen didn’t produce a life-giving response. But that doesn’t negate the reality that imprinted on our souls is a desire to be seen. It makes me wonder how my gaze impacts God, the one who designed this longing into us. The way in which He designed our gaze to create a physiological response is intricate:
Physiologically, when you are gazing at someone, you are transmitting infrared energy from the retina. When two lovers, or a mother and an infant, stare into each other’s eyes, they become info-energetically connected....This limbic resonance travels from the retina to the occipital area of the brain, pulsates to the heart and throughout the entire body and is ultimately stored as a cellular memory imprint, or “love map”, in every cell of the body.” (Pearsall, 1998)
Our brains have 30 percent more neurons devoted to vision than any of our other senses. In addition, gaze between two people activates the areas of the brain involved in processing visual motion as well as understanding the thoughts and intentions of others. Our gaze is an active force.
When God designed our senses, He was stunningly intentional in designing our eyesight. Okay, He was stunningly intentional about every detail on His green earth. But I’m in awe as I ponder His intentionality with eyesight.
Because gaze is central to attachment, it would seem that meeting God’s gaze is critical to attaching to Him. It feels like an art to meet the gaze of an invisible God simply because He’s invisible. Yet—as St. John of the Cross captures in the following quote—beholding His gaze will transform us.
The gospel has eyes, and the point comes on the journey where the bride (His followers) meets those eyes which had long been looking on: “It seems to her that he is now always gazing upon her.” It has been said that “a person is enlightened,” not “when they get an idea,” but “when someone looks at them.” A person is enlightened when another loves them. The eyes are windows unto the heart; they search the person out and have power to elicit life. So the gospel has eyes which are not dispassionate, nor merely passive. Their gaze is not an art gallery gaze, wandering from exhibit to exhibit and leaving what they see obviously unchanged. Their gaze engages what they see and affects it: “For God, to gaze is to love, and to work favours.”3 These eyes are effective: “God’s gaze works four blessings in the soul: it cleanses the person, makes her beautiful, enriches and enlightens her.
When Moses responded to God’s call to return to Egypt and tell Pharoah to release His people from slavery with a big, “Heck no!” God didn’t give Moses a pep talk. He said to him, “Look at me.” (Exodus 7:1, MSG) He invited Moses to gaze into his enriching life source. In His gaze, he would find the courage to follow Him into Egypt.
What sort of revolution would occur in our world if we allowed the gaze of God to answer our deep questions. To cleanse us, to affirm our beauty/strength, to enlighten us. For many years, I have practiced asking God to lift my gaze to His gaze. A more challenging practice is to settle in with Him, allowing His gaze to fill me and answer my deep questions. As I grow this muscle, I’m finding myself less needing to be seen by another and more focused on channeling the gaze of God into another’s soul.