Put aside what exactly we mean by sight—physical, intellectual, etc. Whatever sight is, it is a form of direct knowledge. Intellectual sight is the direct apprehension of some reality. Physical, sensory sight is the direct sense apprehension of some reality. So to ask the question “Does God see us?” is really to ask, “Does God know us?”
We almost certainly want to say yes. But if we are Christians and thinking rationally, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we do not often act as if this were true.
After all, we do not seem to be aware that God sees us and knows us when we are in the midst of sin. Or perhaps we are aware, but we think that God simply looks away for a moment, for which we feel guilty. I mean, such presence and perception seem overwhelming, and so the mind finds ways of tuning it out. As T.S. Eliot writes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
There are, furthermore, deep currents of Christian—especially Protestant—thinking that deepen this divide in vision. Often, when teaching the doctrine of justification, I’ve had occasion to discuss the Lutheran concept of imputed righteousness—the idea that Christ’s merit gets credited to our spiritual accounts in a kind of cosmic book-fixing, meaning that we get to go to heaven without actually having our sin-sick souls healed. Where this becomes especially strange is when the legal metaphor turns into a visual metaphor. I grew up hearing that when God the Father looks at us, he doesn’t see us at all; he sees Christ. There’s some truth there that a Catholic can and should accept. But instead of seeing how we grow into the full stature and likeness of Christ, what these preachers more often mean is that God really does not see us because he cannot see sin. Our existence is meaningless. We are but dust, onto which God slaps a picture of Jesus.
I have to confess that I never found that image comforting, because it makes God comfortable with the idea of falsehood; it makes God appear too weak to elevate and heal the creatures that he made in his image. It makes God blind.
But in the tradition, we are the ones who are blind. We are so blinded by the double-darkness of sin and ignorance that we do not even fully know ourselves. God, says St. Augustine in his Confessions, knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. We see in a mirror dimly. He sees face to face. Augustine adds, “And though in your sight I may despise myself and reckon myself dust and ashes, I know something about you which I do not know about myself.” By this I think the saint means, I know that you know more about me than I do, so there must in the end be more to my life than mere dust and ashes.
God sees us. He sees the dust that we were, the dust that we are, and the dust that we will become. And yet there is this wonderful fact, recounted in the Ash Wednesday collect—one of the best treasures in this missal unknown anywhere else in the Roman Rite: “Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou has made . . .”
We might rush through it, but what an extraordinary statement. Undeniably true, theologically speaking, and not just because it’s in part a quotation from the Book of Wisdom: God can hate sin, because sin isn’t something that is made, but rather the corruption of what was made. God’s hatred of sin, then, follows from the fact that he refuses to hate what he has made. Dust, in other words. Us.
Ash Wednesday is normally seen as a reminder of our mortality. And it is. But that statement that we make isn’t just about death; it is also about creation. It’s not just “unto dust shalt thou return,” but also “remember that thou art dust.” In other words, you aren’t an accident, you aren’t a necessity, you exist by the love who crafted you out of the dust and gave you his own breath.
And he sees you. He knows you. Even if you do not.
This theme of sight and blindness is a common one in Lent. It starts with the contrast—I find it interesting to think of it almost like a ritual insistence on our hypocrisy—between being seen by God and being seen by men. It reaches its experiential climax in Passiontide and the sacred Triduum, when the images in the church are veiled, then again unveiled, as on Good Friday, with a command to look: behold the wood of the cross, on which was hung the world’s salvation. You may not want to, but look. See what you have done. See what you have become.
Lent is certainly about self-examination and penance. But the point I want to make is that the perfection of these things is not simply in making a perfect act of penance and self-examination; we do not know ourselves well enough. To know ourselves well enough, we have to know God. We have to see him. Just as I often tell people in the confessional, it is not ultimately good enough to just stop sinning—we have to replace the bad habit with a good one. We have to see beyond what we are doing, what we ought not be doing, to the good that God wants for us.
So we have to clear up all the debris that clouds our sight. Sin, yes, but also the various good things that cloud our vision. I know it’s popular these days to de-emphasize giving up food and drink and such for Lent, but I don’t really know of anything that gets quite so viscerally at our human ability to be distracted by good things.
If we can turn from sin, and turn also from the good things that hold us back, God will “create and make in us new and contrite heats,” raising us from the dust once again—preparing us, this time in the glory of the Resurrection, to behold his face with clear eyes.