I’m on hiatus until August 29. I’m reprinting old favorite posts. This post originally appeared in October 2005.
I’ve been reflecting on the simple words "Don’t look."
Not long ago, I was walking through Old Town Pasadena with a group of my Wednesday night All Saints teens. We passed two homeless men slumped against a wall. Neither was aggressively panhandling, though they did have a cap upside down on sidewalk in front of them with some small change inside. As we approached, I heard one of my girls say to her friend "Don’t look, those guys are really disgusting." They quickened their pace and dropped their heads and hurried on. Since we were out on a small, informal, but nonetheless "church-approved" outing, I should have spoken up right away. I didn’t, however, and that was my mistake.
Our selfish instincts tell us that there are many things from which we ought to avert our gaze. Homeless people, for one. Dead animals by the side of the road. The sick, the needy, the unattractive. From the time most of us are children, we’re taught that it’s okay, even appropriate, to turn away from the reality of human and animal suffering. Most of us don’t want to see what the cow goes through in order to become our burger. Most don’t want to see how my beloved chinchillas die to become coats. We don’t want to see the weeping parents in Pakistan, the desperate and starving children in Niger. These images will upset us, discomfit us, challenge us — and we don’t like that.
My mother regularly gives to a wide variety of charities. She’s long been a steady contributor to Amnesty International and other human rights agencies. But she hates seeing the terrible pictures often enclosed in their mailings to her, pictures of human beings who have been horribly mistreated as prisoners of conscience. She often says, jokingly, "I’d give them more money if they’d stop sending me those awful photos!" She wants to give, but she doesn’t want to see. I understand; my wife and I get an extraordinary number of solicitations from animal rights organizations, usually filled with images of abused and malnourished dogs, horses, seals, and other creatures. And I have a hard time looking at all that suffering.
At the same time that we are told not to look at the reality of human and animal pain, we are encouraged to look at images that degrade and exploit the human person. We do live in an increasingly porn-saturated culture, a point that commenters across the political spectrum have made with growing concern. It matters little whether we’re talking about the demure Playmate in Hefner’s monthly, or the raunchy images found on a "bukkake fetish" website, we live in a society that is increasingly tolerant, even enthusiastic, about looking at the exposed bodies of (mostly) young and (mostly) economically vulnerable women. What our forebears couldn’t look at (because porn, while very much extant, was not nearly as available) or wouldn’t look at (out of a sense, however incomplete, of religious morality), we gaze at and consume with an ever-increasing degree of comfort and nonchalance.
And as with pornography, so, of course, with violence. In television, film, and increasingly in interactive video games, young people seem to have no problem viewing an extrarordinary number of killings. The same folks who can’t stomach watching a cow slaughtered for food have no problem playing Grand Theft Auto, or sitting through "Saw" and similar bloody epics at the cineplex. Looking at faked violence, like looking at the artificial and falsified sex in most pornography, is much easier than gazing at real suffering, particularly when encountering real suffering and real exploitation might make a moral claim on us to take action.
So I’ve come to a conclusion about my spiritual journey. God is calling me to see, and respond to, the very things that those around me tell me I ought not to look at. God is calling me to look at the homeless man on the street, look him in the eye, and whether I can give him the help he needs or not, at the very least acknowledge him as my brother. I am called to look at how the food I eat is prepared, and not turn away my gaze from the reality of the slaughterhouse. Reminding myself of the smell and the sight of slaughter helps keep me away from meat when I’m tempted, let me tell you! I must look at the images of suffering in Pakistan, Iraq, Louisiana, and Darfur, even though looking makes me uncomfortable. Whenever humanly possible, I must respond to what I see with compassionate action. But if I can do nothing, even then I still must look; in the end, the last thing we can do is, if nothing else, serve as witnesses to the reality of the suffering of our fellow creatures. At the very least, we won’t be ignoring their pain.
And just as I am called to look at what I don’t want to see, I am called to turn away from what I do want very much to look at! Over and over again, many times a day, I find myself challenged to avert my eyes. Each day, I make the conscious choice not to look at porn. Each day, I make the conscious choice not to objectify those whose bodies are a click or two away from being on display on my computer screen. Each day, I remind myself that my eyes are tools to help me see the reality of God’s creation. My eyes are here to help me see those whom I am called to serve, and to see those who I am called to love. They are here to make me more compassionate. Visual porn in any form may please me, but it also inoculates me against the reality of the personhood of the woman at whose body I am gazing. It distracts me from where it is I ought to be directing my sexual energy. And it makes me a little more selfish, a little colder, and a little less human.
Jesus often is fond of turning conventional wisdom on its head. He’ll often begin a talk by saying "You have heard… but I say to you…" What I hear Jesus saying to me at this stage of my journey is that I need to see the very things my friends and family and culture tell me I ought not to look at. And I need to turn my eyes away from the very things that my society encourages me to delight in gazing upon.
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