Hugo Schwyzer

It’s Lent. This will be the earliest Easter of my lifetime (March 23), and indeed the earliest Easter since 1913; we’re already a week into the Christian season of discipline and reflection.

My sacrifice “for me” this Lent is the usual one: no desserts or sweets (other than plain fruit) until after sundown Easter Eve. That’s easy enough for me to do; I oscillate easily between indulgence and self-denial. Of course, as Christians, our sacrifices ought to be more than simple acts of restriction that primarily benefit ourselves. (No one around me is helped in any notable way by my temporary abstinence from sugar.) And though in the past I’ve made commitments to do more volunteering or give more money, I wanted to do something different for Lent 2008.

On our recent South America trip, I spent a bit of time thinking about what it was I wanted my “extra Lenten discipline” to be. Read more Scripture? Attempt — for the 937th time — to integrate meditation into my morning rituals? Those all seemed too familiar, too tried (though no less true for having been tried). As it turned out, I got my inspiration for what to do from one of the many novels we brought along for our three week journey. (I find that I do most of my reading when I’m away from my normal routines; during the regular semester, there’s never much time for pleasure reading.) I can’t remember which novel it was (though it might have been something by Nadine Gordimer), but the chief character in the book was a middle-aged woman who felt keenly the pain of “becoming invisible.”

Last August, I wrote a little bit about the “slide into invisibility“. But as I read my book, it struck me that one of my most glaring character defects is that I really don’t “see” the people around me as well as I should. This isn’t about a failure to see older women as sexual creatures (which was the point made in the book); it’s bigger and broader than that. What I realize is that all too often, my own self-absorption keeps me from really connecting with most people as they really are. As I sat on the plane from Santiago to Ushuaia, I thought of how many people I talk to, speak with, write to every day. And it hit me, as it hasn’t hit me in a very long time, how poor a job I often do of truly “seeing” them.

I thought of my students. Too often, when a student comes to see me, I’m already anticipating what it is that they need from me. As the years go by, and I gain more and more experience, I become better and better at guessing in advance what they want before they ask for it. And while they’re speaking to me, I’m already rapidly processing what it is that I can do for them. It doesn’t mean I’m trying to brush them off; it does mean I fall prey to the tendency to see everyone as presenting a problem to be solved. I focus on what I can do for them rather than who they are — and while that’s not a grievous sin, I suppose, it opens the very real possibility that in my focus on what my response ought to be I will completely miss what it is that they are really saying. I’m an ENFP to the core, which means most of the time, I’m really good with people, but I know that all too often, my own concern with having the right answer or having the most helpful and inspiring words mean that I miss completely what it is that the other person is actually trying to tell me.

As I’ve written about before, I was raised in a family where “good manners” were drilled into us. Over time, as my mother and grandmother, cousins and uncles intended, those manners became second nature. When an older person comes into the room, I no longer have to think consciously about what to do; I stand reflexively. Good manners are very nice, but the danger is obvious: they allow me to display the outer actions of caring and concern (for which I often get validation) without having to see and connect with another human being. After a while, that kind of formal courtesy can become as much a habit as shifting gears while driving; it’s easy to do without any conscious thought whatsoever. And all too often, I suspect, others around me are aware that my outer civility serves to cover the reality that my mind is elsewhere.

So in addition to giving up sweets for Lent, I am praying just one extra prayer this season. It goes something like this:

“God, help me to connect with my fellow creatures as they truly are, not just as I perceive them. Help me to truly listen rather than merely hear; help me to see them rather than merely look at them. Lift from me this cloud of self-involvement. Let me serve not out of obligation but out of love. Just for today, Lord, let me see as you see.”

Overcoming the narcissism that renders all others invisible is incredibly challenging. But more and more, the sense that I am not doing all that I could be to interact with others as they are (and not merely as I see them) is weighing on me. This Lent, I’m going to do as my beloved Forster insists:

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

I have too much beast in me restrained by too much monk. And though Lent is only a beginning, the spiritual project for now is connection.