The Witnessed Life
What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible.
– Jacqueline Novogratz
There is one common refrain in our house: “mom, look!” Look at this book I read, drawing I made, bruise I got, tower I built. The intensity of the imperative is not necessarily connected to the objective significance of the subject, which can be mildly annoying. I’ll interrupt whatever I’m doing because I have to look at something—and it’ll turn out to be an undecipherable scribble or nearly-invisible paper cut.
But the looking itself is part of the point. The scribble or the cut wouldn’t have the same significance if it wasn’t seen by someone else. The pandemic has made me think about how important it is to live the witnessed life. It’s like a version of that old question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it still make a sound?” If I wear a perfectly coordinated pair of pants but no one sees it on zoom, does it still exist in the same way? Well, yes. And, no? Whatever the philosophical answer is to that question, the pragmatic one is clear: sweats it is.
The pandemic has driven home the importance of witness partly because I miss it on so many levels. I miss the peripheral, casual witness of fellow coffee-drinkers sitting at other tables inside a coffee shop. I miss the generally familiar witness of people with whom I make eye contact in a church sanctuary or school yard. I miss the deeper witness and presence of friends I can gather with in three dimensions.
I think rather whimsically about how Biblical law mandates a charge not be brought without the testimony of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19, Matthew 18, 2 Corinthians 13)—it’s almost as if something unwitnessed cannot properly exist. We all need to be seen, and surely this has something to do with being created in the image of a triune God. Each person of the trinity is forever glorifying and enjoying and bearing witness to each other (John 8:18). In Christian parlance, we have made the word “witness” synonymous with “evangelizing,” but the Greek word Jesus uses in John 8 simply means “to affirm that one has seen or heard or experienced something.” It is what I say to my children when they show me something: I see you. I see that. It’s what I’m basically saying to my husband when we go on dates: I hear you. I’m seeing you.
In Job 39:1, God says, “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Do you observe the calving of the does?” I suppose the answer to the tree question is: yes, because God hears it. It’s an astounding thought, that God numbers the months of the lives of every creature in the hills and forests. If He sees lives that no human being is even aware exists, then surely he sees me. I live a witnessed life. God sees me on all levels, from the number of hairs on my head (Matthew 10) to the very thoughts in my mind (Psalm 139). Hagar perhaps put it best when she called the God who found her in the wilderness El Roi: “You are a God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13).
And some level of the meaning in my life is found in human witness: in witnessing the lives of others, and in inviting others to witness mine. We may have to be deliberate about that these days. We may have to find different ways to do it. But it is no less important. And one day I’ll be glad to return to a world where at least some of the everyday witnesses of life are restored. Even if it means giving up my sweatpants.
