Why Do We Wait?

“Why are we waiting for the Messiah; why are we waiting for the Mahavir?  Your eyes will suffice to give tired men hope.”  In “New York, I Love You” Mansuhkhbai, a Jain diamond merchant sits with Rifka, a customer bargaining with him for a diamond.  In the process of trying to soften up each other to have the advantage in bargaining, they each disclose a truth at the busy, hazardous intersection of religion and love.  His wife has left him

to become a Jain nun, shaving her head.  Rifka had just shaved her own head, reluctantly and regretfully, in order to conform to Hasidic tradition for her coming wedding.  The merchant explains that the hair that is given to God in the Jain temples is sold in the West for the kind of wigs that Hasidic women wear, and that Rifka’s own wig might be his wife’s hair.  She slowly removes the wig, and he looks at her shaved head, like the one he imagines on his wife who is back in India.  He (and I, and perhaps you, too) sees the beauty in her eyes as the hair is removed, the symbol of compliance with religion at the expense of love.

He does not kiss her.  There is, rather, the reverent embrace shown here, and asks the rhetorical question above: “Why are we waiting for the Messiah; why are we waiting for the Mahavir?  Your eyes will suffice to give tired men hope.”  I stopped the film at that point, wanting to allow the ripples of this one stone play on my soul’s surface, its circles undisturbed. 

I am a different person when I am looking into the eyes of another.  Kathy’s face is an opening in my wall that calls me out, patiently and persistently, from my instinctive isolation.  Our children and grandchildren look at me with unveiled eyes; we have always looked into each others’ souls without restriction.  With my friends and with those I see on the street and around the table at the homeless shelter, I find Mansuhkhbai’s words to be true.  We need not wait for salvation.  God’s grace comes to us now in the eyes of others.  And it comes not only in the eyes of beautiful young women like Rifka, but in the wounded and worn and contrary.  It comes to us in the eyes of the merchant across the counter.  It comes to us in the face of the beggar at our gate. These eyes suffice to transcend our lack of strength, erase our self-doubt.  The eyes of the other suffice, because they are the longing of God, who in the words of Therese of Avila, suffices. 

God calls us in the eyes of another.  Waiting in solitude seems a poor bargain.