Look into My Eyes

Looking into someone’s eyes offers powerful and unspoken connection: Kathryn Pasker Ineck ponders the wonder of the gaze of Baby Jesus.

Holding my breath, I slowly eased myself out of my daughter’s darkened cotton-candy-pink-and-turquoise-blue bedroom. It had been another evening filled with last-minute trips to the bathroom and requests for drinks, snuggles, long-forgotten-but-suddenly-indispensable-stuffies and blankets while my husband worked late into the night. I could hear my heartbeat roaring in my ears and imagined that it was loud enough to wake the sleeping princess. I could hear my youngest son tossing in bed as I slipped past his closed door, and my heart stopped when I heard an elbow or knee knock into the wall he shared with his older sister.

She sat bolt upright in bed, and I flew back into her room before she called out for me, rousing the house. I reassured her, careful to avoid eye-contact, and started my retreat all over again. I made it past their doors and breathed easier as I crept down the stairs, wincing as one of the steps creaked with imagined amplified sound, and checked on the biggest brothers.

One was asleep, clutching a rosary and a toy hammer, and the other was greedily reading long past his bedtime.

“Bedtime, Buddy,” I breathed, my eyes sliding past his face. Grinning, he gave up the fight and lay back. All was quiet, and I was free to finally eat my own supper and relax a bit before my own bedtime, feeling as though I had made it through a marathon.

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The bedtime routine is often the bane of a parent’s existence. During the daylight, we often imagine it as a time of bonding and warm, cozy snuggles. Once the sun goes down though, we realize that it’s more akin to wrestling alligators into bed.

The day has ended, and all parties—parents and kids alike—are tired and have few energy or patience reserves left. Kids are experts at stall tactics and are masterful strategists, capable of complex negotiations just at the time parents have lost what little sanity they maintained up to that late hour. I read a parenting book which advised that, after tucking the kids in bed for the first time each night, parents should no longer look the child in the eye: rather, they should respond with minimal words because engaging in eye contact would encourage conversation and discussion. This was a hard skill for me to learn because not making eye contact with my kids was rather counter-intuitive: as humans, making eye contact is deeply personal.

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Not only did the Lord listen, but He actually became incarnate and gave us a face to gaze upon. #CatholicMom

Looking into someone’s eyes offers powerful and unspoken connection.

I often turned my toddlers’ shoulders toward me when I wanted them to listen to me, and I ask my teens to look at me when I have important information or instruction for them because I know that when they really look at me, they will actually hear me. This human connection is so important and so integral to the human experience that the Psalmist requests that Yahweh remind us to look at Him:

Lord God of hosts, restore us; light up your face and we shall be saved. (Psalm 80:20)

Not only did the Lord listen, but He actually became incarnate and gave us a face to gaze upon.

The baby Jesus ushered in a new era in which the God of Abraham had a human face, with human emotions and human experience, human hurts and human joys. And because He came to us, He took our sin upon Himself to save us. Not as a warrior or powerful world conqueror, but as an innocent babe in the manger, with a face and a gaze to save the world.

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