Seeing the World with God’s Eyes
The Shema, the Jesus Prayer, and other graces that reorient our vision during crisis.
It can be hard to look at the pain of the world and maintain our trust in God’s presence and love.
Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (135-217) understood this and taught his disciples to cover their eyes with their right hand when they recited the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism.
Jesus gives us a form of the prayer in Mark 12:
‘Hear O’ Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
As we cover our eyes and with intention say this prayer out loud, then uncover our eyes and look on the chaos in the world around us, a chaos we have had a hand in making, the Spirit helps us see the world as God sees it—every person, place, and thing upheld by divine Love even in the hard things God does not want for us or our neighbor or the world.
Praying the Shema in this way—once in the morning and once in the evening—we come to see these words as a spoken promise the Spirit makes to us: we will in time come to love God with all that we are and we will in time come to love every human.
Frederick Buechner says it is God who is at work in us and through us by the Shema: “The final secret, I think, is this: that the words ‘You shall love the Lord your God’ become in the end less a command than a promise.”
Yosef Kahaneman, a Lithuanian rabbi (1886-1969), went looking for Jewish children whose parents had hid them from the Holocaust in convents and church orphanages.
He would walk through orphanages in Europe after the war, reciting the beginning of the Shema. By instinct and habit, some of the children would cover their eyes.
I want to be like these children. I want the divine life to work in me in the praying of the Shema so that I too, like Jesus, come to trust that the reality of God is greater than the “realities” of the world. I desire the unconscious habit of covering my eyes when I pray the Shema.
This practice of closing the eyes and reciting the Shema is not about denying the hard things, not an effort to insulate ourselves from what troubles God and our neighbor, but rather to reengage the difficulties of existence only after prayer that fortifies our trust and strengthens our love.
As a daily rhythm, I pray the Our Father, followed by six recitations of the Jesus Prayer.1 Then I pray the O Heavenly King,2 followed by another six recitations of the Jesus Prayer, and conclude with a final Our Father. This (yes, trinitarian!) practice takes about three minutes.
I sit down in a chair overlooking a grove of black locusts and, as Brad Jersak taught me, breathe from my grounded bare feet up into my chest and then out again as I recite the Jesus Prayer.
As with the grace of praying the Shema, I pray these prayers with my eyes closed to focus on the words of the prayers. I want to say them first with my mind, and in the end I hope to hear them flow from my heart.
I see the world differently when I open my eyes. Last night as I opened my eyes this parcel of deer appeared:
Gradually, one deer came closer and was alternatively stamping his front hooves. I started stamping my feet in return and he would stamp his again right after I stamped mine. This lasted for a minute, stamp for stamp.
What I feel when I open my eyes from these prayers is how Jesus Christ fills all things with himself, a sense of union with Christ through what I am seeing of the world.
The stamping of the deer put an exclamation on that sense of connection and wonder. I felt God speaking through their gaze and through the stamping.
I invite you into these daily graces as we face a world in crisis so that together we can trust God’s promise that all of us will by the Spirit come to love God and our neighbor.
The Jesus Prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
I pray a modified O Heavenly King:
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, you are present everywhere and you fill all things; Treasury of Blessings, and Giver of Life—come and abide in us and save us, for you are good and you love mankind.
The language of religion and spirituality in general and of Orthodox Christianity in particular has become a 'foreign language' for most people and, as such, has become incomprehensible to most of us.
Besides that, it has been misinterpreted, misunderstood and misrepresented for so long that most of us simply disregard it altogether and end up 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater'.
These articles are my attempt to 'translate' this foreign language into something more comprehensible.
I would be interested to see what you think about them.
substack.com/profile/100124894-steven-b…
Thank you!