Richard Rohr, Poe: Seeing
“Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are!” Which is not to see at all. Their many self-created filters keep them from seeing with any clear vision.” Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr ‘s Daily Meditation.
Edgar Allen Poe also gives us more clues about seeing in “The Purloined Letter.” The Paris chief of police asks a famous amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin to help him find a letter stolen from the boudoir of an unnamed women by an unscrupulous minister who is blackmailing his victim. The chief of police and his detectives have thoroughly searched the hotel where the minister is living, looking behind the wallpaper and under the carpets, examining tables and chairs with microscopes, probing cushions with needles, and finding no sign of the letter.
Dupin gets a detailed description of the letter, visits the minister at his hotel and complains of weak eyes so he can wear green eye glasses and disguise his eye movements as he searches for the letter. There it is in plain sight in a cheap card rack hanging from a dirty ribbon. He leaves a snuff box behind as an excuse to return the next day and switches out the letter for a duplicate.
Rohr is calling us to put on a new pair of glasses, perhaps 3 D glasses, to see the depth of what is in plain sight immediately around us in the present moment. We will meet God in the present moment. This is the call of the Christmas Season.
Joanna joannaseibert.com