Sunday Looks

If looks could kill

The look of love

Wipe that look off your face.

He gave me a dirty look.

I see that look in your eyes.

When I grew up, Sundays were different.  Stores were closed – ­all of them, even gas stations.  The reason was that servile work was not allowed on what the Christian world considered the Sabbath.  In Jewish communities, Friday evening would find families dressed in somber clothes walking to temple, walking because sundown was the beginning of the Sabbath, and driving was prohibited because driving was, before cars, hitching up horses and taking the harness and pulling on the reins and the brushing them properly and putting food in their bins and watering them – work that was prohibited on the Sabbath.  Servile work – I recall religion classes at St. Mary’s School, remember trying to figure out what servile work was.  Servile is derived from the Latin, servus, meaning servant or slave.  Servile work was work you didn’t do for pleasure, work that would be done by servants or slaves if you had them.  When I was growing
up, this was hard to fathom. Nobody had servants, and in our neighborhood, you didn’t hire people to do things, you did them yourselves.  But what was it that people did on Sundays?  By deduction, they were pleasure or play.  We’d visit with relatives, or they’d come over.  We’d read, or watch TV.  But we couldn’t do anything useful.  It was Sunday.  In the summer we’d play croquet. 

On weekdays there was pulling weeds and shoveling dirt and scraping the yellow paint that seemed to blister on the siding of the house just a year after you painted it.  There was sanding the drywall day after day, in the rooms that our dad was building for our growing family, only to find him coming home and slapping on more plaster, for the next day’s sanding.  There was the digging up of bushes, moving them from here to there in my dad’s scheme to make the yard beautiful, like the pictured in the magazines.  My brother and I felt used. 

Sartre’s stare and God’s gaze, I wrote in yesterday’s posting.  There are ways of looking at people that call on them to be useful to us.  That kind of look is an imposition, something less than loving.  We hope that they will serve our needs – for affection, affirmation, success, power, prestige.  To the extent that they do these things, we approve of them, seek them out.  To the extent that they do not, we filter them out.  We ignore them.  Don’t we?  And haven’t we felt the same kind of treatment, someone wanting to meet us so they can get something from us, whether it is a compliment or a buck for a cup of coffee?  Or someone looking right through us because we couldn’t be of use to them, because of the clothes we are wearing, or because we’re too young or too old or too black or too white to be of any value to them?  We’re users, and we’re used, or perhaps worse, considered useless.  I can understand why Sartre found that hateful.

But there are Sunday looks, looks that have nothing to do with our usefulness, or what purpose we serve, looks that simply delight in us – looks of love.  In our workaholic, utilitarian culture they seem to be as rare as Croquet games.  God’s gaze – I guess I mean the gift of seeing others as they are, the gift of being seen simply as we are.

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