A Spiritual Issue

There have always been those people we did not see.  I grew up in a segregated south where the black community was present, but for all practical purposes, invisible.  As a pastor I remember the pain of a young woman recently divorced as she spoke of being shunned by people she once thought of as friends.  They no longer saw her.  Even today there are those who live invisible lives in nursing homes, under expressway bridges, and in refugee camps. In some ways it is not just the poor whom we will always have with us, but the invisible ones as well.   

The inability to see one another seems magnified in this culture of instant communication.  Instead of knowing people by looking them in the eyes, we live seeing one another through something so small we can hold it in our hand. We no longer pay attention to the world as it presents itself; we take a video of it.  Our society suffers for many reason, but surely one reason is that we no longer really see each other.  We see, but we do not see.  We see our titles, our roles, the personal benefits which come from an association.  We see the powerful and the disenfranchised, the affluent and the poor, those like us and those who are different.  

Who we no longer see is each other.  We no longer see each person we encounter as one who bears the common imprint of the Holy One who created "them and us."  We may declare our society divided by many factors, but chief among them is one that is spiritual.  Our divisions have made us invisible to one another.  We no longer look at one another and see our neighbor.  Our inability to see one another as one who is us has unleashed a venomous evil which can only be overcome by each of us unleashing God's love through our lives.