“I’m watching a different game”
“Multiple realities coexist. You just need the right lens to see them.” — Rich Paul (Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds, Random House 2023)
Among my early memories of faith, I remember cleaning my room and imagining God was watching me. Because God was watching me, I was extra tidy and moved through my childhood bedroom with excellent posture and a Mary-like facial expression. I now know that lots of people had that fantasy when they were children. They were told God was watching them all the time, like Santa, and they believed it. I also now know that we should focus less on telling children that they’re being watched, and more on teaching them how to look and see.
To be the object of a gaze brings out the worst in us. In an article entitled “Mark Foo’s Last Ride,” (Classic Krakauer: Essays on Wilderness and Risk, Knopf Doubleday 2019) long-form journalist Jon Krakauer writes about how media attention changed the nature of big-wave surfing. Photo ops turned the sport from art to daredevilry. Because a photo could capture the risky move without the eventual wipe-out, media attention generated what Krakauer calls “Kodak Courage,” and the sport became deadly. Respecting the ocean’s strength no longer factored into athletes’ strategies.
To work on the shape of our own gaze is a worthwhile exercise. Scientists — as well as some kooky anti-optometry movements — say that we can alter our vision through training our eyes. If reshaping is possible for the lenses inside our eyes, how much more true might it be that we can reshape the metaphorical lenses through which we see the world? Imagining God watching us all the time: not helpful. Working to take in all that’s happening around us in a Godly way: actually helpful and actually attainable.
Rich Paul is a successful agent representing athletes and executives across the sports industry. He got his education through a combination of a wise and hands-on father and entrepreneurship on the streets of Cleveland. Through dice games, he learned statistics and probability. Through gambling, he learned about human nature. After years of dealing drugs, and hating himself for it given the way addiction had ravaged his mother’s life, Paul developed a legal and thriving business, starting with selling sports jerseys out of the trunk of his car. Growing up on the streets, he faced danger every day, which shaped both his diligence and his vigilance.
He was once asked what it’s like to go to NBA games when an athlete he represents is on the floor. He responded, “I’m watching a different game.” He watches basketball through the eyes of an agent who’s thinking about his player’s best interest and how he can maximize it. He sees the game that way because of his training.
I don’t work with children who imagine God is watching them, but I do educate students at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School. Paul’s story reminds me that I need to help them look at things differently, which isn’t going to happen if my manner of motivating them stops at the grades I assign. Graduate school rewards performance, but the future ministers with whom I work must grow in their watching, more so than their capacity to be watched and commended. Like any form of training, practice helps, and charity begins at home.
I turn my gaze to the newspaper.
When I look at two recently convicted public figures through the eyes of compassion, like Jesus did, here’s what I see: Donald Trump is like a little boy who’s convinced himself that his fantasy world is real and surrounded himself with those who’ll go along with him. He did something wrong but thinks he has the magical power to erase it, and those around him pretend not to see it. I feel sorry for him, but I feel sorrier for his wife. His actions are none of my business except for the question of whether I’d like for him to be President again.
Hunter Biden suffers from addiction. When going through death and loss in his family, the combination of trauma and addiction and public scrutiny caused him to do many things that were stupid and dangerous. His actions are none of my business except for the question of whether I’d like for his father to be President again.
Looking at the world through lenses of compassion doesn’t make us nicer or even happier. What we see can confuse and trouble us. The Southern Baptist Convention voted yesterday on several controversial issues. One of them was to permanently bar women from the ministry (again… still… and this time they mean it) and remove churches served by women from the SBC. In a very real way, the Southern Baptist Convention’s actions are entirely my business.
That the vote failed is good news. As a woman and a congregationalist, I don’t like the idea of a central denominational office imposing rules on individual congregations, and I don’t like gender being used as the great separator (I’m more than fine withholding ordination from people who are neither called nor qualified, of course). 61% voted to ban and remove, but a 2/3rds majority was required. When looking through the eyes of compassion at the SBC’s debate over women in ministry, I rage on behalf of women and churches teetering on the edge between “in” and “out”, with everything depending on who raises what yellow card, when, in a meeting.
Do you know how hard it is to say no to a call from God to ministry? I’ve seen people fight that call for decades, only to submit after retiring from some other field. I’ve seen people give up everything but their call. The SBC is relying not on the Gospel, but on the worldly law from which Jesus came to liberate us. They’re hunting for reasons to deny women leadership roles and acting without regard for those women and the communities they could serve and already serve. A compassionate view, and a majority that wasn’t a super-majority, don’t bring me peace.
Choices about candidates aside. Rage aside. To look at the world through the eyes of compassion is a tremendous relief. It softens our regard for the world and releases us from worry about the way others see us, which we can’t control that anyway. If it’s true that life happens on many levels of reality, which both Jesus and Rich Paul tell us, we can’t choose to inhabit just one, but we can pick which one we watch and how we watch it.
