A new way of seeing
This is an excerpt from the “words for the journey” that were shared on Sunday, January 11, 2026 as part of our Words Made Flesh gathering series.
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Have you heard the word that was chosen as the 2025 “word of the year” by Merriam-Webster? I was a bit surprised to learn that it was…slop. It describes the loads of low-quality digital content typically produced using AI – those absurd videos, weird advertising images, and the talking cats - along with the other fake news that looks so real.
We apparently found it all very annoying, and we also ate that slop up last year. We are so saturated in slop, in fact, that it seems hard for us to sift through and see what’s real.
False images & fake news are not the only things making it hard for us to see clearly. Our differences make it difficult, too.
We can be looking at the same images and see completely different things. Just take a scroll on social media and you will see totally opposite interpretations of current events. “We don’t just see things as they are”, says Richard Rohr, “we see things as WE are”. We each have a lens, a bias, a newsfeed that shapes how we see. Why are we still being so aghast - so outraged - at these differences? Shouldn’t they be obvious by now?
The storyteller John captures different ways of seeing so well in Sunday’s scripture reading (John 1:29-46). Every human who initially encounters Jesus - from John the Baptist to Nathaniel - describes him differently.
He’s rabbi. No, Messiah. He’s no good if he’s from Nazareth!
Come & See by Rev. Lauren Wright Pittman © A Sanctified Art LLC | Sanctifiedart.org
Artist Lauren Wright Pittman captured their differences so well in the digital art piece to the right. She depicted Jesus’ followers each wearing a patterned fabric that speaks to their unique identity and their particular understanding of Jesus’s identity. Each bears a different expression, cloak, posture, and yet Jesus seems unmoved, undeterred by the differences - his only directive: “come and see”.
It’s like he’s saying there’s another kind of seeing that does not get derailed by difference or swallowed up in slop?
In these 11 verses alone, the words see, watch or look come up 8 times and they will keep coming up. While seeing can be a physical, mechanical capability, the storyteller John and Jesus himself point to something beyond mere mechanics.
Already we can tell it’s a spacious kind of seeing - one that makes room for difference - and as we keep reading, we’ll see it also invites continued becoming. Those first disciples were not told to come and blindly believe a bunch of fixed doctrines. They were told to come and see - to be moved - to leave where they were and go where Jesus was going.
And where was he going? Toward the weak and discarded, the outsiders and othered, those who knew they needed help and healing. This spacious kind of seeing will put them in places where they witness incredible healing, yes, but it will also put them in some really hard places, too.
The same can be said for us.
As our eyes are open to see the struggles of our neighbors, we too will find ourselves in hard places - in hospital rooms with the dying, in recovery rooms among fellow addicts, in prisons with felons or picketing the latest state-sanctioned murder.
We may even find ourselves in Minnesota, standing alongside those targeted by masked men conducting inhumane ICE raids. It may even get us killed.
This deeper, more spacious way of seeing should probably come with a warning label: it will always cost us something.
Glennon Doyle says this beautifully & bluntly as she reflects on her own spiritual journey in Untamed:
If we are truly alive, we are constantly losing who we just were, what we just built, what we just believed, what we just knew to be true….I cannot hold too tightly to any riverbank. I must let go of the shore in order to travel deeper and see farther. Again and again and then again. Until the final death and rebirth. Right up until then.
This deeper, more spacious way of seeing will change us. It will move us toward pain, and yet, it’s also the path that leads to life.
How is your seeing these days? Are your eyes strained from sifting through too much slop? Are you getting derailed by our differences? How or who or what are you being invited to “come and see”?
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The word we are leaning into this week is “see”. Where is this word showing up in the coming week? How are you being invited to live into this deeper, more spacious way of seeing?