There’s a pretty uncommon condition called “face blindness.”  It is just what it sounds like; it’s the inability (in varying degrees) to recognize faces.  Some people only experience it with the faces of strangers.  In extreme cases, a person can be unable to distinguish his or her own face and they can be unable to distinguish faces from inanimate objects.

Every time I watch a movie or television show with too many characters, I think I must be somewhere on the bell curve of prosopagnosia (face blindness).  I see the characters and I vaguely register familiarity but I fail at identification.  In real life I have made misidentifications too, but thankfully rarely.  I have, for example, confused Sandy’s mother with her aunt.  (They weren’t twins; not even really close.)  I have suffered with misidentifications of parishioners who (in my mind) looked alike even though I knew each of them pretty well.  Weird, huh?

This is not just an apology in advance for calling you by the wrong name, it is my way of experiencing something everyone does all the time: we look, but we don’t see.  We miss out on the essence of things.  We miss the inner beauty of the person right in front of us.  We fail to see the created order as a lens through which the glory of God is visible and instead we merely see things.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes in Aurora Leigh:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God:

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit around it, and pluck blackberries.”

We pluck blackberries because we don’t honor the holy in the ordinary.  God isn’t far away, out there or up there. God is present all around us: in the budding trees and in the flowers opening to the sun’s warmth.  God is in us and in our spouses and children, in the people we share our lives with – the good, bad and ugly.

Take a moment.  Take a breath.  Open your eyes and behold.  Then, take off your shoes.

Prayer:  Our Father, who art in heaven and on earth, awaken us from slumber and open our eyes to behold you and receive our praise as we hallow your presence before us.  Amen.