I just learned a new word: familect. It’s the idea that every family has its own language, its own dialect, the words and phrases that only make sense to a small group of people and that shape our sense of everyone else. One word from our familect is “spicy water,” our kids’ designation for carbonated beverages. But we also reference language from our annual time at Hope Heals Camp. Hope Heals has built an extended familect of sorts, with both rituals and phrases that carry far beyond the borders of the property where we gather in Nauvoo, Alabama. Words like, “I am with you, I am for you. God is with you, God is for you.” And “You were meant to be here” carry a meaning to us now that extends beyond the words themselves.
In the case of our family at camp, the language reminds us of the lived experience of celebrating the beauty and goodness—without caveat—of families like ours, families who have been marked by disability in one form or another, families who often encounter stares and even slurs, families who have endured assumptions without curiosity, families who have been beaten down by a world constructed without them in mind. That language and those experiences have all been teaching us to see ourselves, to see others, and to see the world through a different lens.
I recently heard a sermon about a passage in one of the letters Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, and I keep thinking about this one line. Paul writes, “We look… at what cannot be seen…”
What does it mean to look—to fix our gaze upon—the things that cannot be seen?
When I was growing up, if I saw someone with a disability, I saw something sad. I saw a hard experience. Sometimes I saw a reality I wanted to look away from. Sometimes I saw a person I wanted to help. But I didn’t see someone I wanted to get to know. I didn’t see a potential friend.
Now, when I see a person with a disability, I see possibility. I see personality. I see someone who can expand my world. I see belovedness. I see an invitation.
Yes, having a child with Down syndrome has changed who I see and what I see. But our years at Hope Heals Camp have done even more to enhance our ability to see beneath the surface of things, to “look at what cannot be seen.” To learn how to gaze upon the deeper truth, the eternal beauty, the solid core of the image of God within each and every human being, shining out through what Paul calls these “jars of clay,” our bodies, in all their diversity.
We live in a world that calls us to attend to the temporary, shiny, surface objects. I am in danger of missing the subtle beauty, the hidden grace, the quiet goodness, the deeper truth. But spending time and offering my attention to those who cannot impress me with their conformity to a shiny, fast-paced world is one way of training my eyes to look at what cannot be seen, the enduring glory of beloved humanity.
Seeing With Love
Ironically, if we are going to become people who look at what we cannot see, we will need both to look differently at what we can see and develop an ability to see what does not rely upon our eyesight. Spending time with people who are not beautiful and strong according to normative standards and seeing them differently—seeing the beauty in their physical appearance, the peculiar features of their distinctive beings—is one way to develop eyes to see what cannot be seen. And spending time with our eyes closed in the presence of a God who is eternally loving us and everyone around us and holding all of creation in love is yet another way to look at what cannot be seen.
I learned recently that I have something called monovision—one eye is nearsighted and the other one farsighted, so I can only see clearly with both of them open at once. My brain uses the information given by each of my otherwise impaired eyes and allows me to see clearly. Perhaps learning to see with the eyes of love is like that—we need one eye open to a different reality right in front of us and one eye open to an unseen and eternal reality deep within us.
It’s worth reading the whole chapter that surrounds the verse I mentioned earlier (2 Corinthians 4), but I’ll just quote the final part here:
“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.”
May we learn to see the permanent, eternal things in us and around us, every day.
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Amy Julia Becker desires to challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and help us envision and build a world of belonging where everyone matters. Amy Julia invites people to reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of several books, including To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Take the Next Step and Reimagining the Good Life. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She is a member of the Disability Ministry Network and the Alliance for Disability Justice and Ethics in Reproductive Genetics. She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.
