I think human beings are built to want to impress someone. To please someone. To get approval. It’s there, palpably, in everyone’s eyes, if you know how to look.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this – nothing at all. It’s built into the tripartite structure of the Trinity, wherein Father and Son gaze upon each other in pleasure forever in a movement that is the Holy Spirit. We are made in the image of God. We long for the same kind of perpetually approving gaze God enjoys within Himself.
Image makers of all kinds instinctively know this, and they have known it for millennia, though they may not have had words for it. The history of art is strewn with their manipulations. Thus a giant portrait of Mao Zedong hovers at the entrance of China’s Forbidden City. Thus late Roman emperors made colossal statues of themselves gazing down through the slanting light of vaulted basilicas. And thus medieval Christendom was sprinkled with supposedly miraculous portraits of the “true face” of Jesus, looking out plaintively from panels, cloths and frescoed walls.
But I think this external, material collection of gazing, authoritative faces is only a faint echo of a much larger spiritual one. That’s because all of us, I believe, toil under the gaze of internal faces, appraising and judging, whose approval we perpetually seek. And most of these faces are not from God.
I think many men go through life with the faces of emotionally distant fathers gazing at them from a spectral height, withholding approval until a secret quest has been accomplished.
I think many women go through life with the shade-like faces of mothers gazing in suffocating, coercive concern at “impolite” behaviors. There is compassion in this gaze, yes, but also envy and destruction, for it conceals resentment toward ease and freedom.
For some who have grown up with abuse, there is a glowering face that always demands its tribute, its pound of flesh. This is a threatening gaze that extracts flattery, groveling or placating in exchange for a reprieve from violence.
And some of us labor under the gaze of our own anxious or judging faces, even if we can’t recognize them. This is because some of us, in order to survive, once turned our eyes from the authorities in our lives (usually parents) and toward idols of our own making. At a young age, we painstakingly formed bespoke-yet-rigid beliefs and boundaries and enforced them with a god made in our own image. This strange, self-made god is the intimately familiar gaze under which we labor. Perhaps we hate it, but we cannot separate ourselves from it or even understand where its borders end and our own begin.
All these oppressive gazes color the way we navigate human relationships. We project them onto others. We take them for granted. They are the water in which we swim. We cannot imagine life without them. Indeed, they have become sight itself; they are the mirror of our inner lives. They shape our understanding of God, friends, spouses, strangers. As a result, more often than not, we are swatting at phantoms when we think we are doing righteous battle with real-life enemies.
I think the history of Christendom has, in a sense, been a history of running toward the Right Gaze. Demonic eyes hovered over the first Christians, terrorizing and tempting them (see: the desert fathers), or more often, terrorizing others into launching persecutions. The Holy Spirit sowed and swirled in vortexes of power, but the haunted human imagination struggled to compass Him. Little demons crouched in our inner recesses, clinging to wounds and vices, sinewy, sharp and panting, claws dug in with existential fervor (“Do not send us to Hell!”1 ). As long as they could distort our sight, they had a chance of hanging on.
But the face of Jesus came and came. It came through clouds and blood. It came through wood and stone. It came through saints. Methodically it banished or absorbed the faces of the old gods.
And now, now, it competes with something much nearer and dearer, much denser and more rooted. It competes with the faces of our loved ones, and the faces of ourselves, so compelling because they resemble the True God Himself. But these, too, it must dislodge, though the pain be great and the vertigo almost maddening.
And once it has done this – once He has done this – He recedes, and runs toward Heaven, where the True Father is, and bids us follow.
And the air around us glitters. And the landscape opens into fields of bracing, velvet beauty. And the air is crisp and clear. And we run.
And there is no judgment now. No glare. No false concern or resentment. No brittle or panicked expectancy. Only mirth and invitation, winking sidelong from the limpid eyes of Joy Himself.
And we say “yes” and “yes” and “yes” and run in His wake, forever.
Katie, as always, what a beautifully written and thought-provoking piece. I just finished applying for promotion which put me in a season of self-evaluation and a million rubrics to measure my progress. I don’t think it’s wrong to be evaluated, but it does put you in an odd frame of mind and focused introspection. Thus, I loved your ending:
“And there is no judgment now. No glare. No false concern or resentment. No brittle or panicked expectancy. Only mirth and invitation, winking sidelong from the limpid eyes of Joy Himself. And we say “yes” and “yes” and “yes” and run in His wake, forever.”
What a beautiful reminder that “panicked expectancy” can be replaced with “mirth.”
Thank you.
In the Chronicles of Narnia, the Last Battle has all dwellers of the Narnia world look into the face of Aslan at the end. And Lewis says elsewhere, there is a Face before whom all of us will hear, “Enter into the Joy….” or “Depart from Me…” “Til We have Faces” explores the idea of face and identity as well, using the old myth of Psyche as its scaffolding. Thank you again, Katie Kresser!
I don’t actually feel the gaze of my socially distant father. He was distant, but I am not haunted by him. I haunted more, as a Christian by the experience of being under the gaze of judgmental Christian leaders, who, sometimes falsely, accused me of some spiritual deficiency. Where this manifests itself presently is most often at home, with my wife, with whom I must relate daily, and it is a relationship in which I feel a need to perform–or else. The problem is that I cannot emotionally handle mistakes, especially when she points them out, and then I become, really, my own worst enemy, a condition that opens me up to much demonic attack, driving a wedge between myself and my wife and kids.
We are reminded to lean on His mercy and grace, and I understand why. Human grace and mercy, especially my own towards the man in my mirror, are very imperfect. And Satan and his demons stand at the ready, eager to pour on the false guilt. It is indeed a fight.