Hidden in Plain Sight

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in …
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

From Leonard Cohen's Anthem


The wallpaper on my Mac is a rotating series of photos I've uploaded over the past few years, so I frequently stop what I'm doing to stare at the images scrolling through.  Most faces are smiling - open, even, like sunlight - with eyes squinted and teeth bared in unadulterated joy; others are pensive, thoughtful, filled with contented Mona Lisa mystery.  These are the shots that elicit my own feelings of gratitude, the ones that assure me of future promise, of hope - the ones most likely to tease my insecurities out into the open, to pat them on the back and whisper that maybe, just maybe, I did okay as their mom. A few, though - the ones of the yellow-haired boy at twelve, fourteen, or sixteen, even - cannot be so easily celebrated.  His eyes, flat and dull like a 1920s penny, stare out of his haunted face - a look not altogether dissimilar to photos snapped of Holocaust survivors or of Russian orphans, or war refugees.  It's impossible to read into those faces anything but the despair of a thousand betrayals, and yet this is the entirety of his face. My son's face. Eyes, mouth, cheeks, nose - all are caught up into that one word: Despair.  The war that rages in his soul plays itself out on the landscape of his lifeless eyes, and, sadly,  that is the thing.  How had I let that colorless portrait escape me?  

As Richard Rohr says, we cannot see what we are not ready to see, especially those things which are hidden in plain sight.  

And yet, Jesus asks the blind beggar, who is both blind and beggar, What do you want me to do for you?  And this man says, simply, I want my sight restored.  Because, at one time, he could see.

But once he sees again, it will all look different.