THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
A recent SWS survey shows that 91 percent of Filipinos welcome the year 2021 with great hope for the future. I am tempted to ask: "How will this hope come true?" The media bombard us daily with news about muggings, kidnappings, robberies, rapes, murders, massacres, the economic downturn, soaring unemployment rate, and the "new normal" in various aspects of our life that foster a feeling of being trapped and alienated.
What kind of future are we hoping for when our waking moments are monopolized by the knowledge that every day, there is a relentless increase of COVID-19 casualties, and mass vaccination for Filipinos remains something devoutly to be wished? If before the pandemic, death was a farfetched possibility, today it is an imminent certainty for everyone. A gnawing sense of helplessness engulfs us.
Simone Weil once wrote that when a man feels helpless, it is as though a gun is pointed at him. The moment he realizes that the gun will not be diverted, he knows that even if he is still breathing, he is no different from a stone or any inanimate object. He feels he is still alive, but he knows he has no future. Death IS his future.
To have death as a future castrates life of all hopes. Compounding this tragedy is the erosion of public trust in the police and military authorities, the government’s inability to assure its citizens sufficient health care, peace and order, and the paranoid fear and collective apathy eating into our moral fabric.
You might think that my outlook for 2021 is too morbid and too focused on the negative. But I have read somewhere that something good can come out of looking at the dark side of reality. This is not wishful thinking, it is utterly scientific.
Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard professor, declared before the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa, the famous painting of Leonardo da Vinci, disappears when spectators look at it directly.
Livingstone opines that Mona Lisa might not have been smiling when Da Vinci painted her portrait. Da Vinci had understood that it is not the interplay of light and shadows that creates the image that we see. Rather, the image is created by our choice of where to focus our eye.
Livingstone explains that the smile is actually created by the spectator's eye as it processes visual information. If he uses his peripheral vision, that is, he focuses on the whole face, not on any particular detail, he sees a smile. But if he looks exclusively at the lips of Mona Lisa, the smile gradually disappears.
So, following Livingstone’s findings, something good can come out from focusing our attention on the negative prospect of 2021. Instead of diverting our attention towards something else, we must look at it very intently, focus on it exclusively, and very soon we will realize that the negativity may not be there at all! Or, if it is there, it transforms itself into something we haven’t seen before. Our eyes conjure up various images of reality hitherto unexplored and unseen. In a very real sense, the way we see things reveal, not the way things are, BUT THE WAY WE ARE.
Today's Gospel reading illustrates this lesson. The Magi found the Messiah by focusing their attention on the immense sky that was filled with uncertainty and frightening darkness. Despite the doubts and frustrations they must have experienced, they eventually found hope (symbolized by a star) leading them to the Messiah.
We who are perpetually distracting ourselves from seeing the sordid situation that confronts us must follow the Magi's lead. In order to find the redeeming possibilities of 2021, we have to stop LOOKING FOR; we just have to LOOK.