Have you ever gotten a new set of eyes? I have. So many times, in fact, that the list is only limited by my challenged memory! But right now, I’d only like to share two, one I had been gifted with over 45 years ago and I have unwrapped it many times since, the second one I received within the past year through one of the many new friendships which we have been gifted with since moving into our over-55 retirement community.
In 1982 The Lutheran Home at Topton had hired a new chaplain and I was anxious to meet him. As I entered the cafeteria one day for lunch, I immediately spotted two folks I didn’t recognize, one with a clergy collar and a woman in a wheelchair beside him. As I introduced myself, both lit up with big smiles. I liked these two from the get-go!
Dave informed me that he was in fact our new chaplain and introduced his wife Linda. Linda immediately gave me a huge smile and then uttered several words which I could not understand. I apologized and shared that I had no idea what she said!
Linda quickly responded with an even bigger smile and an excited utterance which I struggled to decipher without success. Dave immediately interrupted her, explaining, “She said, ‘I like your honesty; we could become good friends!’”
I continued to struggle at times over the next 40 years to understand what Linda was attempting to communicate with her spoken words but the messages from her heart were crystal clear!
Linda’s challenges were the result of a car accident in 1972 in which her car was hit by a man who had stolen a car and was speeding to evade the police. The collision threw Linda out of the car and put her in a coma for over three months, leaving her with multiple physical and cognitive disabilities.
Dave and Linda quickly became two of our closest and most cherished friends. This friendship wasn’t a sudden gift of “new eyes” but rather an ongoing eye-opening transformative experience that offered us a hopeful and often healing perspective as Rita and I had to accept and creatively deal with several health challenges over our 53 years of marriage, including Rita’s MS diagnosis in 1975, my prostate cancer and most recently a large aneurism doctors have found on Rita’s aorta.
David just asked me to speak at a celebration of life gathering for Linda who passed into life eternal recently. As part of my speech, I recounted an incident many years earlier when we were in Dave and Linda’s home and Dave showed me a melted spatula Linda had left on the stove, an occurrence Dave said had happened more than once.
My replica of Linda’s amazing corner-skimming spatula!
Linda quickly piped up, “That’s my own special design!” and went on to explain that the spatula’s new curved shape helped scrape food from the corners of pans more easily. That was classic Linda! I suggested that everyone there think of the spatula (I had even re-created it to pass around!) the next time they faced a difficult challenge and to reflect on Linda’s amazing ability to face head on whatever came her way with humor, creativity, and tenacity.
As the spatula made its way around the room, I thanked our Sneaky God yet one more time for blessing me with this incredible role model and the new eyes she had given me over the 40 years of our friendship.
The second “new eyes experience” I want to share was quite different and happened over the past several months as we developed a friendship with a couple, Jeff and Frieda, we met in a new resident’s group at our retirement community. As we began spending more time together, each of us gradually shared more and more of our life journey.
Frieda, of Jewish heritage, arrived in New York at the age of two, grew up in the Bronx, and later moved to the West Coast as an adult. She became quite successful in the garment industry, through design and manufacturing.
At one point over dinner, she began to share her mother’s story as a prisoner in several Nazi concentration camps. Many of the details were so harrowing they became permanently etched in my memory. At one point her mother attempted to sneak potato peelings out of the kitchen where she worked for another prisoner who didn’t have enough to eat. She was caught and shot for stealing! She survived, but just barely. When the United States military freed the prisoners from Auschwitz in the spring of 1945, she weighed just over 70 pounds!
Frieda‘s emotional pain seeped out as she shared her story. It was clearly a costly gift, but she chose to share it with Rita and me.
Recently I saw a a picture on Facebook of two prisoners the day they were released from a concentration camp. Even though I had long been familiar with the horrors of the camps, especially through the writings of Viktor Frankl and Deitrich Bonhoeffer, I suddenly saw the picture quite differently and experienced a level of emotional pain that I hadn’t felt in the past. Hearing Frieda and her family’s personal story took the Holocaust out of the history books and made it real.
I wondered, How could one segment of the human race judge, condemn and attempt to annihilate another group of human beings?? Equally as concerning was how an even larger group of folks allowed this to happen!
I recalled Frieda’s words, “Learning of man’s inhumanity to man, by a cultured and educated people, opened my eyes to the possibilities of what could happen to a democracy“!
My new eyes have not only changed how I see the past, but also significantly impacted my response to some of the present-day happenings and I trust will influence my actions, as well! Remembering and actually feeling the tragic consequences that silence and passivity had on Frieda and her family, I am committed to speaking out whenever I see instances of injustice or labeling some humans as having less worth than others. My new eyes are now a part of me and will impact what I see and how I respond for the rest of my days!
New eyes can be a remarkable gift but it’s important to realize receiving them may not always be an easy or painless process. It can cause us to revisit some past beliefs and understandings, and consequently to think and respond differently. These ongoing decisions to accept new eyes often requires courage to journey deep within ourselves to explore teachings and beliefs that may have moved us to prejudicial and judgmental “truths”. Whether we learned these from authority figures, significant others, or even interpretations of sacred texts, they often provide us with a false sense of security and indirectly insulate us from the very people and experiences that our Sneaky God is calling us to explore! Adopting a new point of isn’t necessarily easy, but when it opens us up to more love and compassion, it is always worth it!
QUESTIONS FOR DEEPENING THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
- Have you ever gotten “new eyes” that helped you see things from a different perspective after encountering someone else’s life journey? What was one example that comes to mind?
- How did that experience impact you? What did it make you see differently? Did it expand your ability to be compassionate? Do you think there is a difference in first-person account than a second-hand one? Why or why not?
- Is widening your perspective and developing your compassion a good reason to increase the diversity of our acquaintances? Why or why not?
- What are some groups you have become more sensitized to because of a personal connection? If you can’t think of any, why might that be?
- Are there any groups you have deliberately avoided? Why do you think that is? What do you think you might happen if you got to know a member of that group personally?
- Are there life experiences you have had that you would like to share with others in the hopes of increasing their understanding? Do you see this as a “gift” to them? Why or why not?
- Would you be willing to actively seek connections outside your usual social circle that might expand your (and/or their) perspective? Why or why not? What is one specific way you could encounter people that are different than the usual folks you associate with?
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