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| The Mystery within... |
“The whole of life
lies in the verb seeing.” Teilhard
de Chardin
I turned on my television Saturday night just as Frank
Capra’s classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” was ending. I heard guardian angel, Clarence, tell George
Bailey he had been given a great gift--that of seeing what the town of Bedford
Falls would have become had he not been born.
Without George’s kind, compassionate presence in Bedford falls, Mr.
Potter, the well-off unscrupulous banker had free reign to devalue the people
and their town. Seeing this alternative outcome without his influence turned George
Bailey’s desperation to end his life into a joyous celebration for it. Seeing George, his family and Bedford falls
celebrate their joy, made my eyes over flow.
Another gift of seeing is beautifully written in Isabel
Wilkerson’s historical account of America’s black migration north in search of
work and freedom from Jim Crow laws in “The Warmth of Other Suns.” Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, is one of three
people through whom Wilkerson relates this previously unacknowledged immigration
story within America. She says of Ida
Mae:
“ She has big searching eyes that see the good in people
despite the evil she has seen…”
“She had a way of looking past the outer layer of people and
seemed to regard everyone she met with a kind of searching intensity, as if
this were the first person she had ever seen…”
“She was too good natured to waste energy disliking them no
matter what they did but looked upon them as a curiosity she might never
comprehend. She learned to give them the
benefit of the doubt but not be surprised at anything involving them. This alone probably added decades to her
life.”
What if we learned the life giving energy of gifted seeing
more often?
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