Our granddaughter Rumi and I have a Christmas tradition of doing arty projects together. Among them are making Christmas crèches out of wood and tin. We put them on the fireplace mantel at Advent.
Mary, Joseph, shepherds, angels, and wise men gaze at the baby Jesus in the manger. You could hardly call them “action figures”. You could call them “looking figures”.
Not just “looking”, but “just looking”.
My daily contemplative prayer practice aims at this experience.
Most of the time, if I’m looking at all, I’m looking for something. Looking up something. Looking into something. Most of my looking has agendas, preconditions, prejudices, assumptions. There’s something I want, and I’m using my senses to find it.
Looking without preconditions, looking without the intention of seeing any particular thing in a certain way, looking only for the sake of looking – now, that’s a very different experience.
Every day I take a long walk up a hill, with the intention of being as mindful as possible, aiming to take a God’s-eye-view of all that is present within and around me. I love rocks, fossils, native plants, grand vistas. I find myself looking for these things along the trail. And that quest has its own charms and satisfactions. But far greater and deeper is the satisfaction of looking at this impulse to “look for”, letting it go, and then practicing “just looking”. Looking without any purpose or goal or aim. Just observing what is, as it is, in the moment that it is, then moving on and just looking at what is next, as it is, in the moment that it is. Without naming or describing or presuming anything about what is. And then being aware that the One Who Just Is is doing the looking. And that One is beyond observation, time, judgment, opinion, evaluation, or description.
This kind of looking leads to awe and wonder and discovery. It is the wellspring of creativity. It makes it possible to see the needs of other people that might otherwise escape attention. After a while of practicing this divine way of looking, I begin to appreciate what I am seeing on its own terms, not just my own.
Such is the looking at the figures in the crèche scene at the birth of Jesus. The crèche is a window into the eternal quality of the now, an icon of the divine point of view. It is the slack-jawed, timeless, aimless, free, worshipful Awe that is Love that is God.
Maybe the wise men came to Bethlehem looking for the newborn King. But when they got there, and laid down their gifts, I like to think that they ended that quest and just looked at a little baby lying in the hay. Without believing anything about him, without assuming anything about him, without defining him. Just looking with full attention, total presence, and pure love.
So, too, the shepherds looked. They had been “keeping watch” over their sheep. Then they were “keeping watch” over Jesus. Just looking.
So it was with the angels in the myth of Christmas. The biblical Greek word for angel means “messenger”. Somebody who reports on what is, as it is. Not on what is supposed to be. Not on what we wish it was. Angels “watch over”: they just look, and then report what they see. The Greek word for “gospel” is related: “euangelion” or “good message“. The gospel is not just a set of writings in the New Testament. It is the way of seeing the world that was born at Christmas. It is what we see when we just look at what is, as it is, when and where it is, without filters or interpretations or preconceptions. Abba Bessarion, one of the early Christian “desert fathers” who spent their lives in contemplative prayer in the wilderness, offered up this admonition on his deathbed: “The monk should be all eye, like the cherubim and seraphim.”
The Cloud of Unknowing is a profound text of Christian contemplative mysticism by from the 14th century. Its anonymous author wrote that unlike humans, angels “are unable to waste time.” I aspire to this quality of angelic nature. When angels are doing nothing but hovering close and watching, they are doing something purposeful, useful, and priceless. In the depths of our souls, each of us wants to be known and seen as we really are. Sometimes just staying close and watching silently, with an open heart and mind, is the greatest gift we can offer another person – more precious than any tangible gift that can be wrapped and laid under a tree.
It’s an epiphany – the biblical Greek word for a sudden appearance or manifestation – to discover the difference between “looking for” and “just looking”. When I’m “just looking”, I can see divine incarnations that I might miss when I’m “looking for”. And that kind is the seeing that we celebrate at Christmas.
I imagine one of the wise men, while “just looking” at the newborn Christ, meditating this way:
What wisdom I have
Awakens me to my blindness.
I cannot see light itself:
What I know of light
Is only an alluring shadow
Of what it is and does.
From billions of years away in space-time,
Through darkness intervening,
At its inconceivable speed
The light of an exploding star passes
Through the dark seas of my eyes,
Illuminating the dark curves of their retinas.
But I cannot see the glow of their cells:
I can only perceive the messages they send
To my brain, and from there to my soul.
Thus Hope passes,
Unseen and undetected,
Through this dark world.
What retina receives and translates it
Into Joy and Wonder?
An eye comes into the world:
A retina I cannot perceive
That will see for me,
Beyond my dark despair.
A star in the East!
This eye tells me
To follow it
All the way to the Source
Of the truer Wisdom
That is Love.
~ Rev. Jim Burklo