Beholding others is about approaching people as we do God, as a mystery to discover and enjoy rather than to sense-make and control. + Strahan Coleman
"Beholding" has recently been a theme in my life that I think Jesus continues to invite me back to. Why?
This posture as a way of life not only invites me to welcome and witness what God and others are doing in my life, but in response, beholding helps me to worship God as the Creator and Sustainer who I get to thank for all that is in my life.
For more on what beholding is like, here are a few excerpts from Coleman's Beholding.
The Art of Others Seeing
"When I first saw God,
I went a kind of blind.
Now all I see is Heaven
in the eyes of
enemy and friend alike."
Prayer Vol. 01
When we look at humanity
through the artist eyes of God,
we see little miracles in everyone we meet
— even our enemies.
The Church becomes a kind of artistic,
anthropological priesthood,
documenting and celebrating
every little detail of our differences.
As an opportunity to find God,
being hospitable to another person,
to any other person at all,
becomes an act of Christ-embrace.
Seeing Those We Don't Understand
Knowing the fundamental goodness about God means we can be with Him whilst we grow in our understanding. God's goodness is what our relationship is based on. Beholding others is simply our treating others with that same dignity.
If our gospel is sin obsessed, it reduces our story with God to that of forgiveness only, and we're likely to take the sin-central view of life to those around us. Sin will be the first thing we see, and we're confronted with people who touch the nerve of our particular sin horror, we will struggle to see their image. We'll only see their brokenness as the main event of their existence. If our gospel is one of reconciliation, if it begins before the fall in Genesis with God's face-to-faceness with us, then we're more likely to see that essential good in someone first and prioritize their rediscovering friendship with their Father over moral correction. We'll see their image, their imago Dei.
The women at the well in Samaria in John 4 is a beautiful example of this. Jesus was confronted with a woman who had had many husbands and was not married to the man she was presently with. One divorce alone would have had a powerful negative connotation for this woman, and being in her current relationship would have socially marked her further. It would have been all that many would have seen first when they spoke to her. But not Jesus.
Jesus beheld her.
He asked for her water, drawing her into a deeply spiritual conversation, one that He didn't dive into with the all-together religious leaders back in Jerusalem.
Jesus saw something else.
He saw deeper than this woman's mistakes. He saw someone longing for God with the capacity to be a great evangelist. When he relationships did come up, Jesus didn't lecture her on sexual ethics.
He continued to invite her
into the story of God.
And she did become an evangelist. So much so that Jesus stayed for days in the town where she lived as she drew many others out to hear Him.
Jesus did this kind of thing all the time.
He saw the beauty in others
louder than their shortfalls.
To transcend others' shortfalls
and love like Jesus,
we need to become beholders.
It's not an either-or, of course, because one can't be fully reconciled without a transformation of the behaviors that bring relational brokenness.
But repentance was often a response
to Jesus' profound love and grace
toward someone.
It matters that we choose to see someone's God-image before their sin. People are more than their brokenness. When we see others through their God-image first, over and above what we can make sense of in the interim, we can love and behold them, because no matter how they act — engaging us, confusing us, or challenging us — we know that as surely as God is good, His good image is placed within that person and we can find common ground.
Practically, this means when we're talking with those we disagree with, no matter how our arguments end, we never denigrate the dignity or fundamental goodness of one another. Even our enemies. Even our political opponents. It means that when we see another at our borders, challenging our cultural norms, holding vastly different political views, asking more of our financial social situations than we think we can give, we're seeing God and the opportunity to meet and care for Him (see Matthew 25:34-40).
Beholding others
doesn't mean resigning
to their shortcomings
or becoming indifferent,
but it does mean that
on the long journey
toward healing and reconciliation,
we can sit with each other and
see each other with beauty and love.
Love will always long for healing wherever it sees brokenness, and full reconciliation isn't possible without the healing of the brokenness within us.
Becoming Godly Listeners
If we walk with God for long enough, we'll experience seasons of dryness and quiet. Times when all our prayer, tears, longing, and searching will feel like they're turning up nothing. These seasons deeply challenge our assumptions that we can always feel, sense, or hear God when He's there, and we're forced to walk the faith journey in what feels like complete blindness.
It's often in these seasons that beholding prayer becomes a lifeline for our spiritual walk. Here, we're coerced to either behold God for who He says He is or deny Him altogether as we find we don't have the energy, faith, or mind space to wrestle with the questions anymore. Beholding prayer becomes a way of acknowledging that somehow God is sitting with us in the dust of it, strangely available, closer than our skin.
because like the psalmist's,
our prayer finally becomes honest and raw.
though they rarely feel like it
in the moment.
Through them we learn
the silent companionship of God
in our suffering.
Over time we learn to look back and see that He was with us in awareness and acceptance even when we couldn't feel or see it in the moment. He wasn't withholding His love or presence from us by not giving us the answers or healing we wanted; He was demonstrating the audacity of His love to sit with us in our pain without giving them. He was just there with us in our grief much like He was whilst walking with Mary on the way to Lazarus' tomb. In our darkest moments, we were being beheld by God.
For the one who has beheld and been beheld by God through their own dark nights, allowing people to vent their honest anger and rail away at others and God is an act of genuine strength and compassion. They're able to let others fully be, as God once let them be.
I like to imagine a world
in which the Church can become
God's ears to the world.
Listening with this kind of grace,
sitting with others in their darkness,
teaching them how to be
in the tension of pain and
Today, as a whole world of people feel despair and depression at historic levels, maybe God longs to fashion a priesthood of believers who know how to sit in the darkness alongside them with enduring love, even when it feels helpless. We've been really good at talking, sometimes talking at people, for a long time. What if it's time to learn to listen as a form of witness?
What if deep listening
is a way of healing the world,
revealing God to it?
In this way,
for our times,
helping others to make sense
of their pain, suffering,
loneliness, confusion,
success, and blessings
As we behold and love
in these ways,
that love engulfs people into
the kind of relationship with us
that God longs to have
with the world.
It shows them a little more
of what God is like.
We're the closest thing to God
for many on this earth;
we're Christ's body.
So when we love
the image of God in others
and sit with them
in a beholding manner,
we give them a sample
of the magnificent
and all-engulfing
love of God, too.
Not all of us are called to the vocation of the evangelist, but the universal calling of every follower of Jesus is that of being witnesses to what we have seen and touched and of those who have been seen and heard by God. Beholding invites us to be witnesses through our attentive and compassionate listening, as well as through our storytelling and sharing.
It's important to note that this doesn't mean we should keep our mouths closed about important issues in the fear that we may offend people or that it may cause them to feel less seen. That's another extreme, and it's not even the best way to love someone. But love changes our volume, our temperament, the words we use, and the place we challenge from. Reconciling love changes our tone. It makes us, hopefully, slower to speak ... speak from beside rather than across from others.
+ Strahan Coleman
in Beholding,
"The Art of Other Seeing,"
pgs. 98-109
Bonus: The Artist Behind the Artwork
Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first African American artist to gain international acclaim. He was a realist painter and he also stands as one of the leading painters of sacred art during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tanner was not only African-American, he might well be the premier painter of African descent in all art history.
You can read more about Tanner at:
In relation to beholding,
"The Annunciation"
by Henry Ossawa Tanner
captivates me.
Here, Mary listens.
Here, Mary questions.
Here, Mary beholds.
Here, Mary responds
as she begins to see
what God is doing
and what she will get to do
for the life of the world.
And she says,
"Let it be done to me
according to Your Word."
More New Year posts:
May God's Kingdom come, His will be done.
Que le Royaume de Dieu vienne,
que sa volonté soit faite.
愿神的国降临，愿神的旨意成就。
Nguyện xin Nước Chúa đến, ý Ngài được nên.
Jesús nuestra Rey, venga Tu reino!
🙏💗🍞🍷👑🌅🌇
With anticipation and joy,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
