Richard Rohr, Poe: Seeing on Third Day of Christmas
“Most people do not see things as they are because they see things as they are.”
—Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation. Adapted from Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Crossroad, 2003).
Edgar Allen Poe also gives us more clues about seeing in his story “The Purloined Letter.” In it, 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 woman 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 and visits the minister at his hotel. He complains of weak eyes so he can wear green eyeglasses 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 snuffbox 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 around us in the present moment. We will meet God in this encounter. This is the call of the Christmas season.
Joanna joannaseibert.com