c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. His new book, “The Unhealed Wound: The Church and Human Sexuality,” will be published in the spring by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Angels are everywhere at Christmas time, hovering brightly, lighting the cave in which Jesus is born. We see the animals’ breath, wonder in the pilgrim kings’ eyes, the glint of the treasures they lay down as gifts.

This is a feast of sight, for everything draws our eyes to the child, to this mystery, not of invisible heavenly beings or their translucent wings, but of the humanity taken on by God in Jesus.

Christmas, in fact, tells us that spirituality never consists in having private visions of hidden truths but rather in seeing into the public and common mystery of God’s world.

Christmas comes as the light returns after its long flight and begins, little by little, to shrink winter’s chill shadow.

How embedded in our religious sense is this mystery of seeing!

Mystical writers say that insight into ourselves is the price and measure of spiritual growth. “Do you see what I see?” the familiar carol asks, echoing St. Paul’s plangent “I only want to show you what I have seen.”

“If thy eye is single,” Jesus says, “thy whole body will be filled with light.” We have it backward, for seeing is not believing at all. Believing is seeing. So weakness in faith is condemned because “you have eyes to see and you see not.” And false prophets are described as “the blind leading the blind so they both fall into the pit.”

That is an indictment not of physical but of spiritual blindness, the effect of sinners’ snuffing out their own inner light. In the majestic prologue of his Gospel, John the Evangelist writes that John the Baptist was “not himself the light, but was to bear witness to the light … the true light that enlightens everyone.”

Heaven is a feast in which contemplation is linked to sight. The blessed, we are told, will experience a beatific vision. This cannot be some static condition in which we gaze, moved but unmoving, like a tour group entranced but immobilized by staring up at a Sistine Chapel ceiling for all eternity.

Seeing, like a shimmering flame or firelight, is a dynamic transaction, varying in every instant, expanding, becoming more fine and discriminating, never at rest, always going deeper and wider, never exhausted. Heaven will be a mystery, but it will not be mysterious. For people who see into life, seeing their way into eternity will be as natural as breathing. We will see, we are told, even as we are seen.

Hints are found everywhere in life, signals of the divine charm of Creation. Why else would we speak of one of the most profound and transforming human experiences as falling in love “at first sight.” Love, we know, comes first through the eyes. Love is not blind and, in fact, sees more, sees the precious in the other that nobody else can see.

As he was dying, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin liked to recall a pastoral visit to a man whose wife’s face had been ravaged by a fatal illness. The husband explained as he cared tenderly for her, “I still see her as beautiful as the day we first met.”

So the mystical poet William Blake urges us to “cleanse the doors of perception” so that we can see the “world as it is, infinite.” As a result we can extract the horror from such apocalyptic metaphors as the “end of the world.”

The world ends, not in flames, but once we see into it as God’s creation. The world we have known ends as its facades are burned away by our purified and purifying spiritual insight.

Creation then becomes this slowly ripening miracle, as we read in paleontologist Richard Fortey’s description of the extinct trilobite in his new book “Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution.” He notes of the species of MDULtiny shell creatures that its “most distinctive characteristic was its eyes, set atop the head. … Each eye was a bundle of tiny prisms, often hundreds of thousands of them, and each pointed in a slightly different direction so that the animal could scan its entire surroundings.”

A tiny, ancient witness, sewn with a truth we can read about ourselves better by the light of the season. The capacity to see ourselves and each other truly, the ability to see through the false images that are the false gods of our time, the power to see into the mysteries, some as transcendent as first love and some as devastating as the death of a child, that go with being human: That is the utterly human gift of God’s taking on our ways that we celebrate at Christmas.

DEA END KENNEDY