Sartre’s Stare – God’s Gaze

Lazarus – Come out!  What if Lazarus hesitated, to come back to life?  That’s what I asked my group at the shelter last night.  And what they said showed me once again that we are so much alike, we with homes and they without.

Several years ago, Marion Love did an exercise at Manresa with the twenty or thirty of us who were part of a two-year internship in Ignatian Spirituality – briefly, wishing to “Find God in All Things”, and perhaps to help others do so as well.  She gave us each a flat stone – the kind you might toss spinning into the lake to try to skip it, weightlessly, across the surface of the water, flying again and again until gravity finally wins, but not before delighting us, convincing us that maybe it, for this time, would escape, would simply float into the sky.  Imagine this stone much larger, rolled across your tomb.  You wake up, as Jesus did, finding yourself risen from the dead.  All that is between you and new life is this stone.  All you need to do is touch it and it will roll away, and you will be alive again.

I’ve noticed that some homeless people I’ve come to know have worked hard to find their way out of homelessness, to come back to society, but just on the threshold of re-entry, they fall apart, returning to their addictions or closing into a fetal ball and hiding, from a crucial job interview or a meeting with an apartment manager or a social service counselor.  I’ve known others who did step through that door, but within days failed miserably and ended up back on the street.  So last night I invited them to put themselves in Lazarus’s place, called back to life.  And I asked them whether they would choose to come out of their tombs.  I asked them three questions.

What from inside you would make you afraid or reluctant to roll that stone away, to come out?

What in the world out there would make you afraid or reluctant to come out?

What would you hope to find in the world, the new life out there, that would be so good that it would outweigh these fears and convince you to push the stone away and come back to life?

Many felt fear that the sadness, complexity, and chaos of the world would be overwhelming.  But many were drawn forward into that unknown by the dream of acceptance.  They long to be seen as themselves, not held up to others’ standards or put thought others’ filters in order to be determined as valuable and of worth.  They dream of being looked at as who they are, and not as how they look or act.  They do have much to be afraid of, as they look at the inside of that stone.  Even for those of us with roofs over our heads and income and families and friends, the state of the world and of our country and of our neighborhoods can be, in their word, overwhelming.  But bereft of all those things we have, they dare to push that stone away, and all for being seen as having value, having worth.

Marion used the exercise to encourage us to ask us what we were afraid of, what held us back from entering into a life of trust in God, coming out from the safety of our comfort zones into s new life of grace and the more that God is, and call us to.  She asked us to write on one flat side of the stone what held us back.  That would be the word we would see there on the inside of our tomb, the word that sealed us in.  My word was fear, just like my group at the shelter.  And she asked us to write on the other side of the stone, what would be the outside, the word that would describe what we would find if we had the courage to leave our tomb.  My word was freedom.  Theirs was most often some form of acceptance.  As we discussed that, a number of them shared that they longed for acceptance not only from other people, but from themselves as well, to forgive themselves their past mistakes, to find value in themselves.

What would you write on the two sides of your stone?

I thought of the way my group wanted to be seen, by others and by themselves.  I thought of Sartre’s concept of the hateful stare, the look of judgment that they feel on the bus, and in the waiting room for benefits or healthcare or a job interview, the look dehumanizes them, inflicts itself upon them.  And I thought of God’s loving gaze, the tears of the Prodigal’s Father as he sees his son returning, as he looks into his worn and guilty eyes, drawing in his loving look the wear and the guilt.

How do we look at the marginalized?  How do we look at others in general?  How do we look at ourselves?  Where on the spectrum from Sartre’s stare to God’s gaze would our needle point?

Tomorrow - looking at others with judgment, or looking at others with joy.

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