See People Like A Sunset
To help capture the truth that we are God’s masterpieces, I often tell a story of the time I took an Uber during my graduate studies. The woman who drove me asked, “What are you going to school for?” I told her, “I’m getting my Master’s in Theology for Marriage and Family because a lecture series called ‘Theology of the Body,’ written by the Pope of the Catholic Church from 1979-1984, changed my life.” She then asked, “What is ‘Theology of the Body’ and why did it change your life?” I then asked her, “Do you have a faith by chance?” and she responded, “No, I don’t.” I knew it wouldn’t be wise to talk to her in Christian ‘lingo,’ so I posed a question instead, “What would the world be like if we looked at one another in the same way that we look at a sunset? Because Theology of the Body, just as in Scripture, reveals to us that the human person is the most beautiful in all Creation.” She then said, “Oh my gosh… the world would be so different.”
I have told that story many times and I will never forget a college student I shared it with came up to me months later and said, “Brendan you would be proud of me! I have been telling that story to so many people and sharing with them their dignity and worth. I have a story I want to tell you…I was at a bar with my classmates and a woman asked if I could walk her home because it was late and dark outside, and she didn’t want to walk alone. So, I walked her home and got to her doorstep to say goodnight. She then asked me, ‘Ken, would you like to come inside for some tea?’ I wasn’t sure what she was wanting, if you know what I mean, but I thought it would be nice to have some tea, so I went inside. When we were talking, I remembered what you said, ‘What if we looked at one another like a sunset?’ so I tried to do that with her. She then said to me, ‘You know Ken, there is a gaze about you. The way in which you look at me is so piercing. What’s that all about?’ I then asked her, ‘What would the world be like if we looked at one another in the same way that we look at a sunset?’ She was stunned and a few moments later she began to cry.”
Our hearts know we want to be seen as wonderful, marvelous, and captivating to someone else’s eye. If we are looked upon as bad, dirty, ugly, or unattractive it can be very wounding and may cause us to doubt our innate goodness. Let us begin to look at one another according to the truth of who we are, like Adam and Eve did in the beginning, because, “We cannot become our true selves until another person affirms us…We become our true selves when we see our goodness reflected back to us in the eyes of another person who loves us.”[i]
[i] Dennis Linn, Sheila Linn, and Matthew Linn, Belonging: Bonds of Healing and Recovery (Paulist Press, 1992), p.90.