The Fear of Cosmic Indifference

My mother was, in ways I am only now starting to understand, my witness.

I mean that in the most literal way: she watched my life, observed it.  My day-to-day interested her.  She kept a record of names, faces, events.  She knew the litany of the people who hurt me and the experiences that gave me joy.  She cataloged my interests, my likes and dislikes.

I don’t think I understood, for a long time, how rare it is to be seen in such a way.  In her absence, I’ve missed it: that sense of someone engaged with the minutia that interests me.  Not that I’m not loved or that the people who love me aren’t interested in my life: they are.  But few can manage the scope and level of involvement that my mother invested.

To be seen is to understand that you matter.

When I performed in high school band I was one in a sea of faces.  I knew the other parents were not there for me.  But for my mother, I was the one performer worth watching in the crowd.  Her willingness to be my audience of one made me feel that I played for someone, that my effort had not gone unnoticed.  And in small moments, when my feelings were hurt, I knew that somehow saw they were hurt.  Noted them.  It didn’t stop the hurt, but I wasn’t alone in my suffering of it.

I think now we live in an age of unseeing.

I mean that literally.  I’ve caught myself doing it.  In San Diego once, in a busy area where homeless folks and panhandlers grew quite active and tried to engage in conversations with passersby, I didn’t want to be stopped and so trained myself to not see.  Don’t make eye contact.  Don’t engage.  Don’t feign any sort of human connection or engagement.

We do the same on buses and subways: headphones on, eyes forward.  With neighbors: brisk walk to the mailbox, maybe a slight head nod while moving, no small talk.  We speed up to avoid awkward small talk with that colleague at work.  We make faces, give helpless shrugs, point when someone tries to encounter us: sorry, phone’s on, what?

That’s very literal, of course, but we stop seeing people in a thousand other subtler and more painful ways.  They talk about their hurt and we say “mmhm” and nod sympathetically and otherwise let it pass from us unnoticed.  They share a triumph that we don’t witness, that we forget about as soon as it leaves their lips.  They live the day to day struggles of normal life in a vacuum; we don’t pay attention.

I think, often, of a wild and strange moment from my teenage years.

I was fighting with mom.  About what?  Who knows.  Separation, angst, alienation, any of a thousand teenage frustrations.  My mom was like most mothers of teenagers: she wanted me to get through my high school years safe and well and loving the Lord and not falling into the pitfalls that can trap and ensnare.  I was like most teenagers: desperate to be independent, wanting to be heard, yearning to be acknowledged for the person I felt I was.

What I remember of the fight is not the content but the sense that she didn’t get it, would never get it, that I was completely and fully misunderstood.  And because I was so used to her seeing me, this felt like a betrayal.  I couldn’t make her understand.  The more I tried, the worse the argument got.   So I stalked off to check the mail, to calm down, still seething with this sense of feelings unexpressed—

And I punched the mailbox.

I don’t know why, to this day, I did this.  I am not a violent person and I am not given to fits of temper.  But I punched the mailbox so hard I rocked it on its post, and I left myself a bloody cut on my knuckle.  It turned into a scar I have to this day.  At the time, I remember, it felt satisfying: that someone would have to see me.

I think about that, some days, when I think about what it means to feel unseen and unheard.  To believe that your thousand small triumphs and tragedies spin out into existence unnoticed and unremarked.  What a lonely thing.  What a fearful, miserable thing, this prospect of cosmic indifference: that there is no audience who cares, no one watching you or holding you up, no one keeping you in that loving gaze.

Except that God does, remarkably.

The Bible tells us about the minutia of his attention, the granularity of his focus.  He is keeping count of tears.  He is writing down our days.  He is counting hairs and sparrows. God has an interest and an attendance to the most minor of details.  He is, as Hagar put it, the God who sees me—and not just me, but all the tiny components of my small and mortal life.

I am seen.  And in being seen, I grow steadier.

I miss the way my mother engaged in my life.  But I know that God is engaged and paying attention.  So I haven’t lost that sense of being supportive and acknowledged.  It’s been there as long as I’ve known Christ.  Which explains perhaps why I take it for granted.

But I think of people out there who don’t have that sense, who don’t know God, who feel that they must battle against a vast cosmic indifference where all the small parts of their lives simply mean…nothing.  Carry no weight or significance.  I see those people doing what I did with the mailbox as a teenager: lashing out, hurting, wanting something to show to others.

One of my hopes for the coming year is that I’ll get better at seeing people.  At noticing.  At investing some of my life in acknowledging theirs.  I hope that for some people who don’t feel seen or think no one is noticing, that an experience of it might guide them to the God who sees much more deeply than I can.  I hope to, if I can, covey the blessing of what it is to matter to someone—not for any particular reason or merit, but just because you’re loved.

To be seen, to be loved, to be known.  It changed my life without my knowing.

Sometimes, it takes so little.