I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I don’t know how many of you happened to see this piece from last week’s New York Times about how to fall in love with a stranger (or near-stranger). I was fascinated by it.
Like a lot of people, I have conflicted feelings when it comes to intimacy. I need it and I fear it. I seek it and I turn away from it. I don’t want to be the person who pushes others away… yet something in me demands to be fenced and protected, safe from probing and questions and, yes, the exposure of being too clearly seen.
What is that fear about? It’s shame, right?
I’m pretty sure that when you come right down to it, it’s shame. Primal as my fear of spiders or my love of infants. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t know if it’s learned—the result of too many shaming experiences—or something I was born with. It’s just there, something to be worked around. And there have been times in my life, many times, when something has happened and I have found myself engulfed in it—flooded, overwhelmed, blotted out by its life-destroying power.
Those times are fewer and fewer, thank God. Love and prayer have made me so much stronger. The floodwaters of shame, wherever they came from, however they got inside me, are mostly underground, a scalding reservoir deep below, or perhaps a Smaug, a fire-breathing dragon, sleeping beneath the earth.
Falling in love with my husband was the beginning of healing. There were no 36 questions. We didn’t mean to fall in love; in fact, we were trying not to. And perhaps that was part of the power of the experience, that shame had finally met its match, in a love as primal and powerful and irresistible as itself.
There were no 36 questions, no 4-minute timers. But there was a lot of gazing into each other’s faces, with amazement and gratitude.
I can’t count the number of times over the years that my spiritual director has gently asked me whether I am ready to feel GOD’S gaze resting on me, with total adoration and delight.
My response is always the same (with greater or lesser intensity)—where can I hide?
Only lately, two years into my contemplative prayer practice, which is really a practice of allowing God’s healing to enter and penetrate (those words of intimacy!), have I felt able to begin sensing prayer as a TWO-way gaze of love. Only lately have I been able to let myself begin feeling God’s gaze resting on ME in my prayer. Looking back at me looking at God.
That’s how far I’ve come.
I’ve come a long way.
I have a long way to go to where God longs for me to be. But that’s fine. The Dragon, Shame, is in retreat.
I’m ready to be seen.
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.