First of all, Merry Christmas.
For those of you for whom this was an important day, I hope it was joyful and peaceful and good. For those of you for whom this was just another day — I hope it was joyful, and peaceful, and good.
This week, I have been writing about waiting. Waiting for Christmas, waiting for light, waiting for dawn. Intrinsic in waiting is expectation and intrinsic in expectation is hope.
One cannot wait without waiting *for* something. The act of waiting is a hopeful one. To despair is to cease to wait for anything at all.
This week, also, I have been writing about seeing — about that warmth that flows over us when someone looks and sees through all our awkwardness and physical imperfection (the nervous talking, too much or too little; the roll of fat; the mole on the chin of which we are ashamed) and sees us as we truly are — as, I wrote a few days ago, vessels of the divine.
The wonderful thing about such seeing is that it is in all of our powers all the time. One need only look at another person (any other person) and turn their whole attention to them, focus their most loving and forgiving gaze upon them and, look, the person is transformed.
The terrible thing about such seeing is how often it is withheld. How many of our neighbors and siblings wait and wait and wait to be seen until they grow weary of waiting and fall into despair.
Dawn’s work, which I have been writing about this week, is as much about seeing as anything else. The work that she does with children with disabilities and with refugee families is about, daily, turning eyes of love fully upon them; letting her hands work from the outpouring of a full heart.
I think, though, that it is easy for those who spend their days seeing others’ pain to begin to feel invisible themselves. Those on the front lines of war and poverty and illness, who see and see and see can (I think) forget that there is anything but this endless seeing — anything to wait for, any reason for hope.
So as I sit here at the end of a day that was, for me, peaceful and joyful and good, I am thinking about how I can make better use of my vision. It has been a gift this week to see Dawn and her work through the lens of Christ and his birth. I wonder what other good and tired servants are in the periphery, who else I have failed to focus on, and what else I might see if only I looked.
I will make that my prayer this evening: May I have eyes to see and the will to look and the desire to wait not for my own pleasure but for the need of the person who needs me to be for them the eyes of love.
Perhaps some of you might be moved to look more at Dawn and her work. She has some thousands of friends on Facebook, so I bet she’d talk to you there if you messaged her. You can also see her website here: https://ssmfi.org/missionary/dawn-hoffman/
And if not, that’s OK, too. Maybe this whole week was just a lesson for me, and if so, thank you so much for bearing with me. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.
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