Sunday July 26: The Single Eye

Alfred Freddy Krupa, The Eye, 2015

The Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream at night. God said, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” Solomon answered: “O Lord, my God, you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act. I serve you in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a people so vast that it cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong.”
- I Kings 3:5, 7-9

Jesus said to his disciples: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant searching for fine pearls. When he finds a pearl of great price, he goes and sells all that he has and buys it.”
- Matthew 13:44-46

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With a golden opportunity to ask God for whatever he wants, Solomon recognizes his own inadequacy and God’s infinite power operating within him, and so he asks for wisdom. It is his recognition of the need to look beneath and beyond the shiny surfaces of things, to see union and unity with “the single eye” that sees as God sees. Meister Eckhart writes of this analogy when he says, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

In the Gospel, Jesus compares the reign of God to a treasure or a fine pearl that is worth the loss of all else, if only we may receive it. Again, we are invited to let go of limited and limiting perceptions, and to understand reality through the eyes of an awakened and aligned heart, mind, and body. Thomas Keating sums it up well, in his exhortation to change the direction where we look for happiness.

The life of Jesus exemplifies this single-eyed approach to life, and he calls his disciples to the same way of seeing. While our lives unfold through the daily rounds of home, neighborhood, and workplace, we are invited to make the ordinary stuff of our days a major focus of our spiritual practice. The Zen adage that meditation in the marketplace is far superior to meditation on the cushion teaches the same lesson. Our life, just as it is, is the perfect school for our awakening to the is-ness of Presence.

How do we do this? Perhaps one answer is in the cultivation of intentionality. We can roll through the same routines of rising, meditating, eating, working, relaxing, sleeping, over and over, but when we back up enough to see all this with the single eye, an eye not distracted by the whining of the false self or the whims of the cultural milieu, the clean, spacious grace of our everyday life comes through. We see the royal path of the One moving through our many tasks and obligations. In turn, our daily contemplative practices provide the nourishment and support for this intentional living. Our acquired human conditioning may at times war against this, but contemplative practices give us the spiritual muscle tone needed to keep on letting go of all that would distract our single-eyed embrace of God in the here-and-now moment. What is being revealed at every moment is nothing less than the evolving reality of Christ in ourselves, in others, in history, in the cosmos. Selling all for this treasure-laden field, this priceless pearl, is exactly what our practices are doing, as they shape the intentionality of our every moment. And in Christ, there are no throw-away moments. The path, the treasure, the pearl, are always right here, before us.

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“Spirituality is the awareness of the oneness that underlies duality and difference, as each outward action reveals the interconnected presence of the holy. It is neither partial nor selective, filling each and all. A person may be more or less conscious of the sacred in every day; she or he may even deny or reject it. But spirituality is the primordial stuff of existence and therefore is always present. A feeling of oneness with life, deep empathy and compassion, genuine selfless love, and an abiding trust in the unfolding of reality are marks of a spiritually aware temperament.”
- Beverly Lanzetta, Radical Wisdom: A Feminist Mystical Theology

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• Set an intention for the coming day, perhaps even the night before, that you will be more attentive to events as occurring in God’s presence. If you do Lectio Divina in the morning, you might want to use the word or phrase that attracted you during this time and carry it with you throughout the day as a way of seeing with the single eye, with the reality of God’s presence, power, and action. Using a note-taking app is a great way to keep your lectio words literally visible.

• Our perception of people, situations, and tasks can become jaded, especially when they are part of our everyday routine. We become less able to let go of all that weighs us down. Choose one situation or person and, ahead of time, pray for the grace to see with the single eye, unaffected by prejudgments or foregone conclusions. See the person or situation at hand as a real manifestation of God’s unfolding evolution in time. How does this change your encounter?

• Choose something to look at with the single eye - without thought, evaluation, judgment. It could be something in nature, something in your home, even a much-loved pet. Just as you “let go” of thoughts in Centering Prayer, use the same mechanism as you gaze at your chosen subject. Set a timer for a few minutes. Afterward, sit with your experience. If you are inclined, you might want to do a brief, simple sketch.

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