Seeing is Beginning

We call it insight, the ability to understand something deeply, to really get it.  There have been more comments during the last four days than during any of the previous seven months of this daily blog.  The subject has been pretty simple – to hug or not to hug, to accept or reject the invitation to a momentary embrace.    But it turned out to not be simple at all; approaching and touching another person turns out to raise all kinds of questions of risk and reward.  How do we decide to walk by or to encounter another person, or for that matter anything other than ourselves?  A Jesuit named Howard Gray used the Good Samaritan story as a way of providing us with a model for that decision-making experience, that is begins by seeing.

The situation in the story is that a man is lying half dead on a street known to be stalked by robbers at night.  It is the first light of morning, and three people walk by and see this man.  Their reactions are different, just as they are different.  The first is a rabbi.  Gray says that as a rabbi, he’s in a bind.  The guy is not moving, does not respond to the rabbi’s calling over to him.  If the rabbi touches a dead body, he will need to go through complex and time-consuming cleansing rituals, and chooses not to take the risk; he goes on his way.  The second, the story goes, is a Levite, a lawyer, familiar with the code of laws that govern what a just Jew should do in any situation, to be sure to do the right thing.  The lawyer needs to take time to study the fine points of the law (the road is known to be dangerous, so the man was imprudent, etc.) and so he goes on his way, too, leaving the man there in the dust of the road.

Perhaps the story would work better, more effectively, if instead of calling it the story of the Good Samaritan, we called it the story of the Good Outsider.  Until now, the passers-by have been Jews, like the victim.  The third man to come by is a non-Jew, Gray says, a Samaritan, a people hated by the Jews because of centuries of religious differences.  They were alienated from each other.  The outsider does something that the insiders did not.  He ministers to him, giving him what we would call First Aid, and them he takes him – this stranger – to an innkeeper and gives the innkeeper money to take care of him until the Outsider returns from his journey.

Why did the Outsider do what he did?  Gray proposes that this is a model for us, that it shows us what it means to be human.  He proposes that our job as humans is to make the world better, and that it all starts with seeing.  He says that this outsider did four things, each one a gate to the opportunity for the next. 

·         He saw the man as one in trouble, as one in pain and danger, and when he really saw…

·         He felt the man’s pain as his own, and when he felt…

·         He helped, he had to; he felt compelled to do so from something inside himself that called him to act.

·         And Gray goes on to say that the Outsider did something to change things for the victim, to make them better for when he would be gone.

See…Feel…Help…Change…and become human.  That’s what Gray says.  Why?  Every word in our vocabulary came from someone else.  Every cell in our body and everything we wear and eat comes from outside us.  Every idea in our head comes from something we learned or experienced from others.  So the issues raised by the Free Hugs videos – attraction of revulsion, to approach or to ignore, to touch or to remain separate, determine how we constitute our selves.  These issues determine who we become. 

So the people we see, according to Gray, give us the opportunity to take the next step, to feel something well up from within ourselves, something that reaches out to meet the other, the person or thing outside us, to form a connection that becomes our growing self.  By connecting we go beyond sight to insight. 

But it all begins by seeing, by really looking.  If you watch the video again, you will notice that the encounter begins with eye contact, that those who walk by avoid looking. 

Here is a series of photos of people.  We don’t have to hug them.  They are no risk to us.  What catches your eye?  
What do you see?  
Please comment and help us learn with each other?

Please comment and help us learn with each other.  If you respond anonymously, some kind of name you give yourself will help us know you in later comments, too.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.