Is There More Than One Perspective?
BY MIKE VAN VRANKEN
The gospel stories during the Easter season are filled with Jesus sightings. After all, Jesus spent a lot of time healing blindness. He claimed he came for the “recovery of sight to the blind” (Lk 4:18). Now resurrected, even the people who lived with him for the last three years have a hard time seeing and recognizing him. In each case, it’s only after they have listened to what he has to say that they recognize him. “My sheep hear my voice” (Jn 10:27). It almost appears that what we see is based on how we hear. I recently enjoyed a homily by Father Mark Thibodeaux about perspective. How we see Jesus and his message sometimes depends on what we really hear which may alter our perspective.
In the homily, he explains how a Lutheran minister asked North American seminarians why the young man in the story of the Prodigal Son ended up starving in a pig pen (Lk 15: 11-32). The answers were all pretty unanimous that the boy had sinned terribly, betrayed his father, took the money, and squandered it on dissolute living, and now he finds himself starving in poverty. It’s all because of his sinful ways. I think most of us would answer the question the same way.
Then this minister went to St. Petersburg, Russia, and asked seminarians there the same question. Their answer was entirely different. They said the reason the boy was starving was that there was a famine. Verse 14 of the story says there was a famine in the land and the boy was hungry. It was a famine that the Russian seminarians focused on. Why? The grandparents of these seminarians lived in St. Petersburg in 1941 when the Nazis surrounded their city and would not allow food to get through. It is said that over a million residents starved to death. After listening to these seminarians explain how they had heard this story many times, it was easy to see their perspective was not on the sins of the Prodigal Son but was on the famine.
Finally, the minister traveled to Tanzania in Africa and asked the same question to seminarians there: Why did the Prodigal Son end up starving and living with pigs? Was it because the boy sinned, or was it because of the famine? Their insight into the story came from yet another perspective. Verse 16 of the story explains that no one gave the Prodigal Son anything to eat. The Tanzanians explained that the message of the story is not about an individual at all. It’s not about the boy’s sin or about a famine. They contended it was about a comparison of two different societies. The Kingdom of God, and a society without honor. A society with people who would not give a stranger or a foreigner something to eat when he was hungry. In contrast, the gates of the Kingdom of God are always open and there is always a place at the table for the stranger, the alien, the misfit, for everyone. They said whether one sins gravely and squanders the gift of God, or whether a famine strikes their land, and all are starving, the gates of the Kingdom of God will openly welcome each of us to our own place at the table.
In these three instances, the perspective or seeing of each group of seminarians was based on what they heard in the gospel. And each group heard something different based on their own experiences in life. Which group’s message of the gospel story is correct? All three, of course.
This month, as we ponder the Jesus sightings in the gospel stories, it would be good for us to imagine how hard it is for us to see Christ in others, especially when we are only listening to them from our own perspective; unless, of course, we are not listening to them at all.
We begin by asking God for the grace to awaken our ability to listen to others from their perspective as well as ours. When I listen with an open ear to the other’s story, I find clues about what they have experienced in life and how it has affected who they are now. This changes the entire panorama of what I begin to see. And eventually, it changes my heart and I start to see the Christ that’s been in them from the beginning of time.
When someone else truly listens to you and your story, they find a perspective that is uniquely yours. They begin to understand where you are coming from. In return, you feel validated and respected and even loved. As you contemplate the three perspectives of the seminarians mentioned above concerning the story of the Prodigal Son, will you ask God for the grace to be such a listener you will learn to see everyone else’s perspective on all of life’s issues? You don’t have to agree with them. This is a practice of listening, seeing, and eventually loving.
