REsources for Living
What if you had x-ray vision like Superman? What would you use it for? Of course, real x-rays let you see through skin and muscle to the bones underneath, but they wouldn’t let you look through the walls of buildings to see what the villains were up to inside. But never mind. It’s our game of pretend, and we set the rules.
So what would you want to look at if you could see through any surface to get a clear picture of what was underneath?
You could see fish swimming at any depth, no matter how murky the water. You could see birds in trees, no matter how dense the leaves. You could see what your sister or brother (or child) was doing in their room after they told you to go away. You could look for gold or diamonds under the earth or find your missing sweatshirt out of the pile of clothes without having to move things around. It would be awesome, although it could also be potentially embarrassing.
Of course, people who aren’t superheroes—which is to say all of us—don’t have this amazing ability. But we do have a different kind of x-ray vision that is its own kind of superpower. While we can’t see objects that are hidden behind or underneath something else, we can see meanings that hide below the surface. We can look at tiny green buds along the branch of a tree and know that those little knobs mean that spring is on its way. We can look at a bank of fog coming over the hills and know that the weather is going to cool off. We can look at the tight face of a friend and know that although they say everything is fine, they really could use some support. We can look at a drooping plant and know that it needs water.
But our x-ray vision can help us see even deeper below the surface than these straightforward predictions. We can hear a baby laugh and know that, for all its terrible tragedies, the world is a beautiful place. We can look up into a sky full of stars and know that we are a tiny part of something more immense and complicated and creative than we can imagine. We can look into the eyes of a dog and know that love conquers all. We can witness a ten-year-old standing up to a bully and know, with Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King, Jr., that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Of course, we can’t see these things with our regular eyesight, and so we can’t prove that they are true in any scientific way. That’s what makes this kind of seeing beneath the surface a supernatural superpower. Sometimes it’s called faith. Now, I’m not a fan of the kind of religion that says that you have to accept things that simply aren’t true as a matter of faith. It’s not seeing below the surface to declare that the earth is only 6,000 years old because that’s what it adds up to in the Bible, or that men have one fewer rib than women because God took a rib out of Adam to make Eve. You can hold fossils that are far, far older than 6,000 years old in your hand. Heck, you can see pictures painted by people in Spain something like 40,000 years ago. And you can use regular old x-rays to determine that men have just the same number of ribs as women. Religion that asks you to believe in things that contradict the plain evidence of science is just as much of a fantasy as a superhero comic book.
The surfaces of things, what they really are, matters, and we don’t do anybody any favors if we pretend to see something that simply isn’t there. But in addition to seeing the truth about the surfaces, it’s also possible to see things that don’t show up with our ordinary vision. We can look at a tadpole and see in its legless body and flipping tail the frog it will become. But we can also see in a tadpole the truth that every change involves some loss, and that every loss opens us to becoming somehow new. How a tadpole becomes a frog is science, what we learn through careful attention to what we see. The nature of change as expressed by a tadpole is religion, what we know by paying attention to what lies underneath what we see.
It turns out that a lot of real-life superheroes have this particular superpower. In the 1700s Universalist Judith Sargent Murray looked at what the world called “womanhood” and, unlike the rest of her society, saw intelligent human beings who deserved the same rights and responsibilities as men. In the mid-1800s Unitarian Dorothea Dix looked at the mentally ill and saw, not the surface that the world called “crazy,” but rather the deeper truth of the worth and dignity of all people. In the mid-1900s Rachel Carson looked at what much of the world regarded as “natural resources,” and saw an interdependent web of life in which all beings—people, plants and animals alike—depend on one another for their survival. Martin Luther King, Jr. saw the reality of oppressors and oppressed, but he also saw the deeper vision of brothers and sisters all connected by the love of God.
OK, there might be superpowers that you would rather have. It would be very cool to be able to stretch out your arms and fly, or swing from buildings on your spider webs, or see through someone’s pockets to know what they are carrying. But as superpowers go, being able to find deeper meanings in the details of life isn’t at all bad. At least this kind of superpower is available to all of us who are willing to take the time not only to look, but also to see.
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