You walk down the street, or cram onto the metro during rush hour, and you're surrounded by a mob of faces.
A body - that's just a bundle of cells, proteins, water, blood - atoms, matter.
The you I perceive is perceived as such because lightwaves bounce off the matter making up you, and I have these rods by night these cones by day that are oh, so, adept at visualizing you.
But that's not you, that's your body.
The stinky, ratty clothes that could really use a wash; the overly proper and too perfectly polished get up; your wrinkling skin that's too old for the time you've spent here; that long, warm, dark hair falling down to your waist; those knees that give way, frail from too many adventures necessity took you on; your protruding veins, your protruding eyes, everything bulging out of a body too thin -- every single physical feature by which I too often judge capacity for life and love and loveability -- none of those perceptions are really you. It's just light bent a certain way due to a living, breathing, moving mass of matter. Which does have a lot of beauty, yes, and a lot of stories to tell. You are, in part, your body, but you are also so much more.
Your soul.
That's what I can't see. That's what I usually don't see or think of when the light's just right and I'm moving down the street quickly, when I see you all everywhere, around me in a lecture hall for 650 beings. But your soul, your heart, your mind... That's what's going to last and that's what is there to love, first, and most.
I want to learn to see the beauty in every broken and perfectly created body - I want to see souls.
A few months ago, I was with a group of friends and we were discussing objectification, how we are all too focused on the surface. Two sides seemed to form, as we brought up strategies for how we're trying to fight this human tendency. One side said: strive to expand your definition of beauty, to perceive everyone as beautiful in a different way; the other: remember that beauty, the surface, isn't what's most important - don't let beauty matter so much to begin with.
I think though, that if we'd talked a little longer, there would have been no cause for disagreement, because I'm certain that the two can go hand in hand. It wouldn't do our capacity to appreciate beauty justice if we strove to stop valuing it, but, it is also true that it is not all-important, especially not as we define it. That's why I want to see hearts, minds, spirits, and to see these in and through the body. We do experience life through bodies after all - experiences write on each of us, our skin, fingers, eyes, and hair catching all the unassorted unfinished pieces of life story, and laying them out in one great, ever expanding and changing corpus. This, life's external imprint, is tied to its internal marks; it's in the interweave that we find people, and what is each person? As I believe it, each of us is an image-bearer of the divine. Once you see that, it's impossible for a perception of each individual as beautiful to not follow, and this beauty comes with a very expanded, supernatural definition indeed.
I want to remember that each person I perceive is not some static, 2D point that drifts in, then out, of my line of vision, not some body only, but this huge complex sphere, a planet with rings that overlap and interfere with many others' rings, just as mine do in each of the relationships I do and don't hold dear.
To not perceive a library or a metro full of ever-studying and journeying robots who drift in and out, relieving each other of their shifts, but as people that are every bit as dear to God and as much His image-bearers as I hope myself to be.
I want to see you as a bundle of emotion, intelligence, thought, aspiration, and love. To see your beautiful bright eyes, yes, but to see them as beautiful because they are reflective of whatever it is, within, that is you. Because you, you bear the image of the Most High God.
I want, desperately, to walk through life seeing souls; to not just perceive in a way that is limited by light and matter, but to see.
