Amid a marathon of ‘modern praise & worship’ songs in a New Year service at church the other night, one older chorus stuck out and stuck with me:

“Turn your eyes upon Jesus/Look full in His wonderful face/And the things of earth will grow strangely dim/in the light of his glory and grace” – Helen H. Lemmel, 1922

The premise behind the name of this blog is that ‘dimness’ of ‘sight’ is not strange at all. Just the opposite: it is an inherent feature of our common humanity. We are not strangers to dimness and so we are not strangers to one another, because our shared experience of human limitation unites us. We love one another better when we accept that we cannot fully know ourselves or our ‘others’.

The premise behind this lyric is that we ‘see’ most clearly the things to which we ‘look’.

1. seeing as knowledge
   • If ‘seeing’ is a kind of knowledge, I think this is false. It depends on what we’re looking at and how and why we’re looking at it. Some things seem to forever recede from clarity no matter how hard we try to focus on them.
   • My experiences with depression have taught me that even when I ‘look’ for rational explanation, understanding, or causation as deeply as I can within my subjective experience, I never see the bottom. There may not be a ‘bottom’ to see there at all. Objectively, though, I can look at things like brain chemistry, lifestyle behaviors, pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions, and gain a different, more helpful, sort of clarity.
2. seeing as love
   • But if ‘seeing’ is a relation of love, then this seems true. To be seen is to feel valued, and love is valuing the other enough to actively contribute to and work for their good.
   • When I ‘look’ at Jesus, I see God in a human face looking back upon me with love. And his look of love upon me transforms my own vision of him from mere looking to deeply loving. “We love because God loves us first.” We love God as a dim reflection of his complete love for us. We love ourselves as a dim reflection of his complete love for us. And we love others as a dim reflection of his complete love for them.

“Attention is the most basic form of love; through it we bless and are blessed.” — Western Zen teacher John Tarrant Roshi

The song gives voice to Jesus’ invitation to repentance. Turning our eyes upon Jesus necessitates turning away from something (or everything?) else. To look full in his face, we make an effort to focus our attention away from all that is not Jesus and attend to Jesus fully.

But what are we turning away from? The contrast is from darkness to “the light of his glory and grace.” And the lyrical content identifies the darkness with “the things of earth”, which “grow strangely dim” by comparison with the light.

As a song, it is beautiful and I love it. But like all poetic language, the beauty that gives it power can also be misleading. It’s unfair to demand analytic clarity from poetry. But its helpful to my soul to ‘translate’ the raw materials of our worship into tools of language for my spiritual practice and daily use.

‘Dimness’ is not an condition we escape when we attend more fully to Jesus. It is the opposite. We experience greater dimness when we behold the transcendence of God than when we look at “the things of earth”. So dimness itself is not strange; it is our home, our comfort, our assurance that we are drawing nearer to the heart of reality whose center is God.

What is “strange” is that the “things of earth” should grow dimmer at all. Things of earth appear to us as the most clear. What could be clearer than the everyday objects of my sensory perception? “No one has ever seen God” but I can quite clearly see the desk, the lamp, the laptop screen, and the trees beneath the sky outside my window.

But the song isn’t referring to “things of earth” as only those things we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. If that were the case, then the face of Jesus, which is a human earthly face, would grow strangely dim, too. To pay attention to Jesus more fully we have to pay more attention to those things of earth, not less.

It is always when we think we are seeking God in some transcendent ‘Heaven’ that we fail to see that “the Kingdom of the heavens is at hand.” It’s when we look for the glory of God in some hyper-real manifestation of spiritual ecstasy that we fail to see “the glory of God in the face of Christ.” When we seek the power of God as some form of pure supernatural energy or spiritual force and the wisdom of God as some kind of superior insight or enviable aptitude, we are unable to see that it is the Chosen One condemned and crucified that is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

So turning our eyes upon Jesus is not turning away from the things of earth, but turning toward the things of earth.

But from what do we turn away? Next post. This one is too long already!