bearing blog: Correction, and the damaged icon.

A Facebook friend posted this quote the other day, and I am basically blogging it now just so I can remember it.

Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him. One does not help a person by discerning what is wrong, what is ugly, what is distorted. Christ looked at everyone he met, at the prostitute, at the thief, and saw the beauty hidden there. Perhaps it was distorted, perhaps damaged, but it was beauty none the less, and what he did was to call out this beauty.

---attributed to Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh

The more I look at it, the more I am drawn to it as one of the great principles for governing our voices in the world--I mean, the principle has been around for quite a long time, it's just that this is a very concise and memorable way of putting it.

As I commented when I first saw it, "Good for remembering when someone is wrong on the internet." But it is more than that, and I keep coming back.

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Who was Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh? For years he served as archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Ireland. He published six books on prayer during his life. Texts (in English) of numerous sermons are available at this link. I haven't been able to confirm the quote or figure out which publication it comes from via internet-only searches yet. This article suggests it might be tracked down in a book about him, This Holy Man by Gillian Crow.

I found other pieces sometimes connected to the quote that go as follows:

This is what we must learn to do with regard to others. But to do so we must first have a purity of heart, a purity of intention, an openness which is not always there - certainly not in me - so that we can listen, can look, and can see the beauty which is hidden.

Every one of us is in the image of God, and every one of us is like a damaged icon. But if we were given an icon damaged by time, damaged by circumstances, or desecrated by human hatred, we would treat it with reverence, with tenderness, with broken-heartedness. We would not pay attention primarily to the fact that it is damaged, but to the tragedy of its being damaged. We would concentrate on what is left of its beauty, and not on what is lost of its beauty. And this is what we must learn to do with regard to each person as an individual...

...but also – and this is not always as easy – with regard to groups of people, whether it be a parish or a denomination, or a nation. We must learn to look, and look until we have seen the underlying beauty of this group of people. Only then can we even begin to do something to call out all the beauty that is there. Listen to other people, and whenever you discern something which sounds true, which is a revelation of harmony and beauty, emphasize it and help it to flower. Strengthen it and encourage it to live.

(versions of the quote here, here, here)

And a similar quote in this article suggests it might be tracked down via a biographical work, This Holy Man by Gillian Crow. But that's as far as I got this morning.

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Unless we look at a person and see the beauty there is in this person, we can contribute nothing to him.

I think a lot of us think that we are justified in criticizing, commenting, and correcting any other person as long as we are correct, or as long as whatever we want to say is important enough.

But I think it is nearer the truth to accept that we can contribute nothing to a person whom we do not see as a real person, with good in him or her. What we wish to say might be true. What we wish to say might be eloquent or beautiful in and of itself. But without a sense of the human-ness and the intrinsic goodness of the intended recipient, we cannot contribute it: we can only transmit, or worse, inflict.

The content of the message, alone, cannot justify every act of communicating it. That is a type of ends-justify-the-means. And even if it is a message we are bound to bear, we can only be bound to it in the sense that we are capable of it; and the idea here is that we are not, in fact, capable of "contributing" it to everybody. And when that's so, the fault is often on the messenger's side.

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I've heard it said that we should "look for opportunities" to speak the truth. I guess the idea is to find people in moments when they are open to our message, and strike at the vulnerable moment. It's better than not looking at the people at all, but even that falls a little flat. Because when we look at a human being we should see a person for their own sake, not an opportunity to enact our desires or even our mission. If I, specifically, cannot see the humanity particular person I'm thinking of addressing in a particular moment, "there is nothing I can contribute," and I should probably just shut up and find another conversation.

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But what about when we have a clear duty to correct falsehoods, imposed not by a specific relationship with a person spreading them, but imposed by the ethics inherent to our own position? If we are scholars, or teachers, or journalists, or editors, or leaders in government, or have pastoral responsibilities?

Such individuals might be bound to correct---not people, exactly---but other people's bad messages. And really, any of us might be in a position to be able to protect our friends and family, or the wider public, from objectively wrong messages. Disinformation is a real problem today; friends and acquaintances may be spreading falsehoods, sometimes dangerous ones. Besides disinformation, some expressions of "mere" opinions can also promote objective falsehoods, such as vile prejudices or broken visions of human dignity.

So sometimes we may rightly judge that we have a duty not to be silent, even if the person spreading misinformation, or vile prejudice, or whatever, is someone we can't bring ourselves to view in the moment as a human being possessing inherent beauty.

(Face it. Even if we wholly subscribe to the notion of inherent dignity of all human beings: Some human beings really test us.)

Even if it is very difficult to see the goodness and humanity of a given spreader-of-untruths, so that we cannot contribute anything to that person, I think it's possible to counter their misinformation. The key is speaking to the other listeners, refuting the message, offering the better alternative.

Maybe it's best to acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that we are unlikely to be able to reach the original poster. We don't know them well enough; we can't see them well enough as human beings; possibly they won't see us, either; all we know is that, from our side, we can't contribute to them; we lack the grace to see them as fully as we should.

But there are other people listening, and we can address ourselves to them instead. And in the meantime, we should be working on seeing the goodness of humanity in as many people as we can.