I asked the Creator for new eyes

I’ve always admired people who could see the world clearly and feel deeply about it. For much of my life, I moved through the world with a sense of detachment, perhaps too absorbed in my obsession with being the Good Christian Girl to have much capacity to truly see other people.

2 Corinthians 5:16-17 in The Message Bible says: 

"Because of this, we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life emerges! Look at it!"

My world was very certain and very narrow, my identity inextricably tied to those narrow certainties. I was the Good Christian Girl, and I was good at it. But as I grew older, sometime in my early thirties, I began to realise that something was missing in my sense of my own humanity. The thinkers and writers I loved seemed to have a deep connection to the world, to their own pain and the suffering of others, and to immense joy and great, expansive love. I had a growing dissatisfaction with my own feelings of disconnect from the heights and depths I saw in the writing of people whose work I admired and respected, people like Sarah Bessey, the late Rachel Held Evans, and our own beloved Liz Milani. 

There was a depth of reality, a level of nuance in their world that I had rarely experienced in my own world of black-and-white certainties. I was hungry for a life that included that kind of depth, and so I began to read their words and books, to really listen to the voices of people who felt the joy and pain of humanity deeply and were moved to love and action because of it. I so badly wanted to live that way, to wake up my senses and experience the world, to feel REAL in the world, to see and deeply love people, and to be able to hold the tensions and contradictions of life the way these courageous, fully awake teachers and mystics truly seemed to. What made them so wise, so connected, so intuitive?

I felt that I was only half awake, doing all the right things, wholly devoted to serving God but lacking the fundamental compassion that was so vital and vibrant in the people I admired and, ultimately, in Jesus himself. Why couldn’t I see people - truly see people in their humanness and their preciousness - the way that Jesus did and the way my heroes did? She who has eyes to see, let her see. I wanted eyes to see, the capacity to witness a person’s heart, their true self. But no matter how much I wanted it, I simply could not change my sight. I felt blinded by my own human perceptions. And I began to suspect that new sight might require new eyes, a completely new vision of the world. And that perhaps new eyes like these could only be gained on the other side of death. After the old life has gone and resurrection begins - new life, new eyes, a new and more light-filled perspective. Death of this present way of seeing. Death of my old certainties, of all the precious things I tied my identity to and the ways I oriented myself in the world. Then and only then, I was quite sure, could I truly begin to experience the new sight, the new perspective that does not see as humans see but sees the heart, the true person. To know by experience that the only true way to follow Christ and clearly see what he reveals was to take up my cross and follow him into the dark waters of death, emerging into a new life where my ego no longer dominates my view and Divine Life flows through me, illuminating the world around me.

“The old life is gone; a new life emerges!” I thought I was prepared to walk that path. In truth, I didn’t really know what it would mean - death and rebirth were simply metaphors, intangible concepts that I couldn’t imagine translating into real life. But I was tired, so tired, of living only half awake.

So I asked the Creator for new eyes.

And my life as I knew it fell apart.

TELL ME: “Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself continually? Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? Well, there is time left, fields everywhere invite you into them…. Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” Mary Oliver.

Written by Jess Manusama. 
Instagram: the.connectedself

From this week’s guest series, "Safe Availability", with a subscription, in the App.