11/15/2025. Sight, Sacrament, and Communion

Pay attention to how you listen. – Luke 8:18a

“He who has ears, let him hear” is a statement suggesting that hearing is not a fact guaranteed by the ears, nor is sight by the eyes. There is a way of seeing that is seeing well, a way of hearing that is hearing poorly.

If we’re understanding aesthetics as the perceptual frameworks by which we see and understand the world, then stepping back and looking at what sight means today, at how we see, at our modern modes and tools of perception, we might be able to better identify the aesthetic systems that dominate our life, even without our awareness.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

— David Foster Wallace,  2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College, This is Water

Modes of sight in modern life:

  • Surveillance: from the surveillance of law enforcement to the surveillance capitalism of Amazon, Whole Foods, or the Wawa gas-pump, from the State to Silicon Valley and Skylink, from politics to pop-up ads, the internet, our phones, our cars, our dishwashers…
  • Voyeurism: social media, reality TV – whether for titillation or amusement. The gamification of relationships.
  • 24-hour siloed news cycles: the “newsification” of opinion emerges as a more buttoned-up, legitimate form of voyeurism, deploying aggressive and prying tactics to the most sensitive places of loss.

    In a conversation between Marshall McLuhan and Studs Terkel at Kendall College, they begin talking about ‘point of view’. McLuhan says “when you’re swimming you don’t have a point of view. When you’re in any kind of situation… This is one of the horrors of the newspaper profession. They approach people who are in the middle of some horrible experience and ask them how they feel about it. What’s your point of view on this sort of suffering? …people deeply involved in some situation are suddenly expected to be uninvolved and to report to the newspaper what it feels like. The whole population is simultaneously involved and asked to be not involved, to be detached.”
  • “Being seen”: an uncontested good in psychology, the wellness industry, talk shows, podcasts, and other circles where caring for others is the priority. While rightly making room for stories of personal and familial trauma and tragedy, the “seen” in ‘being seen’ rarely accommodates the trauma and tragedy of one’s own sins and faults.

    What this necessarily means is that the seeing is only partial, and love and acceptance cannot extend to the whole of a person, to the darker places in any one of our hearts—to the places of impatience, cowardice, to the meanness, pettiness, or selfishness. In this, “being seen” isn’t actually being seen. It serves as shorthand for a kind of thin advocacy.

By and large these modes of sight are—in one way or another—salable commodities. It’s a way of seeing that is incentivized by market forces.

They result in a dislocation of our senses, often a dislocation from our moral obligations to one another—the separation of aesthetic from ethic. A separation between what I see and how I should live.

These modes of sight are ubiquitous and unrelenting, brazen in their disregard for consent or discretion; a distortion of Psalm 139: 7-8 “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!” The voyeuristic character of our social media feeds becomes a technological perversion of Hebrews “great cloud of witnesses.”

In contrast:

“Praying means being aware I can be seen. The awareness of living in unhiddenness (as noted earlier, this is an exact translation of the Greek word for “truth”) transforms people. But what it fundamentally depends on is the character of the gaze to which we are subject. The eye of God is not the lens of an intrusive camera eager to catch us in a comical or titillating situation, in an unguarded moment with “high viewer appeal,” nor is it the intimidating eye of the policeman prying into our weaknesses and transgressions of the law.”

— Tomáš Halik, Night of the Confessor, p.142

Halik describes prayer as the awareness that I can be seen, and that that awareness—“the awareness of living in unhiddenness”—transforms people. There are two gazes to which we are subject – the gaze of God, and the gaze of modern life, our digitized environments, and the ways in which we’ve organized ourselves as communities ad societies.

And as Halik also notes, the character of the gaze to which we are subject directs that transformation. It guides what we are becoming.

If this is true, then it’s not just that we find ourselves victims of a system of de-personalizing commodification through surveillance, voyeurism, investigative journalism, and the like. It’s that being subject to this way of being seen reshapes our own perceptive faculties. In other words, how we are seen teaches us how we should ourselves see.

As such, we find ourselves not just victims, but as actors in surveillance and voyeurism and the 24-hour news cycles.

We joke about “stalking” one another, but the language is telling. Who is this person, who are their friends, where do they live, what did they eat for breakfast this morning. Are they cute? Do they share my politics, do they like the same movies? Swipe left, swipe left, swipe left, zoom in, swipe right.

“…the process of making a photographic image, which purports to be the real thing and isn’t anything like, has transformed our self-perception, our perception of each other, our notion of what is beautiful, our notion of what will last and what won’t.” – W.G. Sebald

Sebald’s observations, particularly regarding self-perception, shed an eerie light on how this transformed mode of seeing guides what we become.

  • The selfie: personal branding, the curation of one’s image

We become inured to surveillance and voyeurism and to other modes of sight predicated on cruel exposure rather than on grace and love and compassion. Do we seek to cover one another’s nakedness and vulnerability the way that Noah’s sons covered him in his drunkenness? Is our sight characterized by the tender care of Christ, covers over our sins with his own self-emptying light?

How do we heal? How do repair our vision? Perception is the artist’s particular stock and trade, so beyond the desire to become whole human beings, there is a responsibility involved in healed sight.

Beyond just “less screen”, or to use Wendell Berry’s appropriately stark framing—“Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place that it is in”—what do we do?

What habits do we need to put off? What disciplines do we need to take up?

  • ‘Putting painting in touch’. This leads to the difficult — metaphysical — phrase that one witness has Cézanne producing later in life: ‘Je vois. Par taches.’ ‘I see in touches – patches – dabs – stains.’ Or, I see by touches. I see by means of coloured marks: I see by making them. The phrase is a clue to the wider enigma of handling in Impressionism, and what the new speed and immediacy of the hand were supposed to make visible.” — If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, T.J. Clark, p.38-39
  • ‘Inquiry modifies our way of seeing…’ — Paul Cézanne
  • Sustained attention to anything, that is to say — let alone the kind of relentless concentration and elaboration of vision that comes from painting seriously — transforms the parameters of seeing. The human sensorium is plastic: it is changed by use — changed for the better. And what is true of the senses may be true of the instincts, and of our established patterns of knowing and being. We can but hope.

    Loosen the hold of likeness in painting, in the meantime, and wait for the moment at which the known disappears…

    I said that these painters believed that the world had somehow to happen to a picture — impinge upon it, touch it. This ultimately is the point of the ‘tache’. It puts us back in the moment when the world occurs to the sensorium; and at that point it isn’t clear to the painter whether the occurrence is something made by the mind — by the mind’s eye — or entirely a material event, an actual unstoppable touch of light on the receptor evolved to receive it. Is the ‘tache’ transitive or intransitive, in other words? It is certainly a made thing, but made by what…by whom? — If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present, T.J. Clark, p.41-42

TJ Clark – “See by touches” – this is a key point. I compose so that I can hear. There are of course occasions where I’m hearing something and then I write it down, but just as often I write a single note and a world I hadn’t seen prior begins to unfurl. It’s like a drop of ink piercing the membrane of surface tension on the water. The ink flowers through the whole of its new medium, stretching and expanding in tree-like forms.

Sight as sacrament

An experience of divine grace, where what was hidden just a moment before is now unhidden. The Greek word for “truth” is literally “unhiddenness”. Touching the hem of his garment.

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out”, which suggests that the playful dance between what is understood and what is obscured, between hiddenness and revelation is good and right and as intended.

Sight as communion

As T.J. Clark notes: “it puts us back in the moment when the world occurs to the sensorium…it is certainly a made thing, but made by what…by whom?” At its best, it’s a way of seeing that is what Elaine Scarry describes as an ‘opiated adjacency’. This thing has emerged in front of you that is distinct from you, and this apprehension of something else, of its beauty and its strangeness, arrives as a reenchantment of the world.

As Rilke says in Letters on Cézanne, “indescribable, down to its smallest details, as it surely always is…”

Or, as Agnes Martin would have it “their lives [our lives] are broader than they think…”

Sight requires stopping. Lingering. Decision. As Mary Oliver says, “To pay attention: this is our endless and proper work.”

In response to the cruel exposure of our digital environments, I’d like to offer a counter:

Exposure  (Def. 2:b): “the treating of sensitized material (such as film) to controlled amounts of radiant energy”.

Exposure to energy enables exposure of image. The spiritual analogue:

“the treating of sensitized material (such as me) to controlled amounts (such as the disciplines) of radiant energy (such as the Almighty).

God’s image in us develops, emerges, fades into clearer relief. As in 1st John 3:2: “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”