Recently, on a flight from New York to New Orleans, I watched a mother in a seat ahead of me on the plane holding an infant in her arms. Occasionally, the baby would wimper or cry a bit. When this happened, the woman would take the infant in her arms in a soothing rhythm. And even more intermittently, I witnessed the mother’s eyes look down at the baby, whose eyes were likewise fixed on the mother. The mirrored gaze of love between a mother and her child – perhaps the most crucial and formative bodily connections that can exist! It was a graced moment for me to be gifted with this intimate sight.
I am sure that this same unbreakable bonding happened for me and my mother, when I was a child. This same shared gaze can surely happen between a father and a child and I have seen this too. In all cases, there seems to be this mysterious and ineffable transmission of relatedness, which occurs that we carry with us through our lives and indeed somehow draw off of in every interaction we have whether we consciously are aware of it or not. Psychologists tell us that when this bonding does not take place, there can be devastating and irreversible consequences.
I recall having this same shared gaze with my mom as an adult, when she was ill and dying. Many times there were questions in her eyes that she could not verbalize, yet I heard them deeply in my heart. I had no answers but this was not important. The shared loving gaze between us was an intimate communion that participated in the divine flow of life and death and life again.
They say that we begin to die even as we are newly born. As we grow and develop, we suffer small deaths all along the way. It seems it is only when the mortality of our conscious lives touch us that we sense the reality of death. It feels strange and fearsome in its mystery and inevitability. Yet, is it not the flow of life itself? Dare we consider that? Could death in all its multivalent movements be precisely the trek of life – the only passageway that life can travel in order to Be life. To be More Life. And going a bit further, could this life that gives more of itself by giving its very self away not be perhaps one of the more nuanced meanings for that overused word of ours—LOVE?
I would like to suggest that this may be one way of looking at what Jesus said, i.e., the Christ message. The “way” of life is love and the way of love is death. This is death as a process of engagement in letting go to the point of letting be. Releasing into a trust in More! This is a giving away to an other that simultaneously gives back in a symbiotic manner that is always more! More life in and through relatedness, relating and relationships.
Some theologians have proposed this type of participatory relatedness that creates and saves and transforms as a possible way to conceive of the trinity.
The love gaze not only mirrors but in a way it creates more love by most times transforming those in relationship. And for transformation to happen, something has to give! Someone has to give…AWAY…many times. But this Someone is Everyone. If anyone of us fall out of the creative process of life transforming itself into more life through death, we all fall “out of love” because love is this life energy that drives everyone and everything forward into More Love! The mutual gaze that must by its nature radiate outward in transformative rays becomes stunted when anyone of us averts our gaze!
Every gaze matters. Every shared movement that gives of and through itself creates more life and love. And that means we all become more of who we are only in and through each other.
Could this be what we mean when we say that the divine lives in us as Christ – we are the embodiment of Christ and we have to “work” at it. The act of seeing each other as Christ is what makes Christ present. The divine makes its place within us as Christ but it relies on our participation. This is freedom not simply through choice but through committed relatedness that happens in the cross section of life and death – which is love!
The bond is strong because it strengthens and grows by breaking. Connections become more durable and simply More through giving. We receive what we participate in and this is a radiant process that transforms into abundance. Many sacred scripture of the world’s religions tell us precisely this – when something is given from abundance, there is no less abundance. Indeed abundance is only itself by giving itself away.[i]
Life…death…abundance…surrender…transformation…radiance…more Life.
Every gaze matters!
[i] As examples: “That is full, this is full, From that fullness comes this fullness, If you take away this fullness from that fullness, Only fullness remains” Invocatory verse of Isha Upanishad, and John 1:16 “Indeed, from his fullness we have, all of us, received – yes, grace in return for grace”
Beautiful, Thomas! Thank you. I hope life is good for you.