A little story I read in the local newspaper gave me a laugh and, then, paused to think about it more deeply. The story came out of Bay Village a well-to-do suburb in Cleveland, OH, which I know well. It is a very pleasant place right on Lake Erie. It is the kind of place most people would be happy to call home. It is not a wildly rich place like a couple other suburbs around Cleveland and, of course, around every city in the US. But it takes some money to live there.
The story had a racy headline. It read, “In Bay Village, Someone Called Cops on a Sleeping Homeless Person.” There was a bit more, but we’ll come to that in a minute. Accompanying the headline was a picture of this figure lying on a park bench. Up close you could tell it was not a real person, but actually a statue or something like that. But it was life-size. The rest of the headline read, “It was a Statue of Jesus.” However, the headline gave us too much. Reading it meant we already knew the punch line. It was not real; it was only a statue.
The story began with an account of how St. Barnabas Episcopal Church decided to use the statue as a prop to make a statement about homelessness in the great urban area. The statue was the object of Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz and the point was to show Jesus as a homeless person who was lying down and covered with a blanket. We have all witness this kind of scene in every major American city. The statue was purchased by a local community center and St. Barnabas decided to use it as part of their outreach ministry. Obviously, it does no good to put it inside the Church. So, they placed it on a park bench in full view of passing traffic. That way they could fulfill their mission of calling attention to the problem.
They likely did not expect it to cause another problem. Within twenty minutes of placing the statue on the bench, someone called the police station to report a homeless man sleeping on a bench. I could easily understand seeing this object at night or from a distance how that “mistake’ could be made. The priest at the Church commented that within twenty minutes he was in conversation with a police officer about the “homeless Jesus,” as the statue has been known. It was reported that the police office was “extremely professional.”
An interview with the Chief of Police indicated the police were just doing their duty. It was important to check, says the Chief. The Chief said, “the officer would have made sure the person was not in any sort of medical distress.” I find this reassuring. It makes for a good ending. What intrigued me, however, was only implicated in the story. It has to do with perception.
Perception is the way we see things. It is almost like an angle. From what angle do we see anything; that shapes how we know it. So, I imagine myself as a passer-by. Glancing toward the park, I see a figure lying on the bench. I know what I see. The question is what I perceive? Am I suspicious and base my suspicion on the fact that a place like Bay Village has no homeless people? We don’t even see them here. They are downtown or other places every person can name. My perception is framed by all that I know about Bay Village, about homeless people, etc. My perception functions to determine what I “believe” to be true.
My suspicion causes me to dial the cops and report the troubling fact that some guy is sleeping on our bench and something needs to be done about it. I imply the guy should be run off. We don’t need things like that around here. It is easy to play this out even further. Of course, since we already know the “truth,” that line of thinking makes us a little uncomfortable. We know the “guy” was just a statue. No harm. I might not know the rest of the story, but I am not troubled in any significant way. In fact, I might be a little curious. To know the truth means I don’t have to rely on perceptions in the same way.
It would be just as easy to say our perception could be the “guy” on the bench was homeless and surely down on his luck. We can be helpful, so we call the cops because they know what to do in these kinds of situations. They have resources and access to the right places to take the guy. I am compassionate to my core and am acting solely out of this laudable place.
All this leads me to my punch line. I want to believe that spirituality is a form of seeing and being very aware of how my perceptions shape my reality. If I shape my life around the virtues, for example, or on Jesus as model of behavior, then I can create my reality such that I will act in an appropriate spiritual fashion. This is very much what I want to do But I also need to be aware of how my own upbringing, my current situation and all that tend to affect how I see things and, therefore, the kinds of perceptions I form.
Perception is how you look. For me this is a place of spiritual growth.
Those of us who have read theology or, perhaps, those who are people of faith and are old enough might well recognize this title as a reminder of the late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber. I remember reading Buber’s book, I and Thou , when I was in college in the 1960s. It was already a famous book by then. I am not sure I fully understood it, but that would not be the last time I read it. It has been a while since I looked at the book. Buber came up in a conversation with a friend who asked if I had seen the recent article by David Brooks? I had not seen it, but when I was told about it, I knew I would quickly locate and read that piece. I very much like what Brooks decides to write about and what he contributes to societal conversation. I wish more people read him and took him seriously. Brooks’ article focused on the 2016 contentious election. He provocatively suggests, “Read Buber, Not the Polls!” I think Brooks puts
Comments
Post a Comment