from a distance

Some years ago Bette Midler sung a song entitled From a Distance. I guess you are not expecting me to sing in this early hour of the morning so permit me just read a few lines from the song.
From a distance, the world looks blue and green
and the snow-capped mountains white.
From a distance the ocean meets the stream
and the eagle takes to flight.

The best picture of the earth, and a bestseller picture at that, is a picture taken from one of the Apollo missions as they were about to orbit the moon. It is from this picture that the earth was named the blue planet. It is a good picture because it was taken from a distance.

From a distance, we all have enough
And no one is in need.
There are no guns, no bombs, no diseases,
No hungry mouths to feed.

Do you know that there is such a surplus of grain in the world that most of these are dumped in the ocean so as to control prices? This is also true with milk, butter and wine. With wine, for example, there is such a surplus that if you pour it out in a super-size pool you can float a gigantic oil tanker on it. There should have been no famine, no diseases, no need for guns and bombs because from a distance there is more than enough to fill each man and woman’s needs.

From a distance, you look like my friend
Even though we are at war.
From a distance I cannot comprehend
What all the fighting is for.

There was a religious controversy in America some years back because a certain denomination could not agree on the method of counting the day the feast of Pentecost should fall. Though it is said that they arrived at the same date for the feast, the group splintered into two because they could not agree on the method. On closer examination they had a point in splitting up, but from a distance, one can’t understand the quarrel when their different methods arrived at the same answer anyway, in this case the same date.

The song came to mind because I was intrigued by the fact that Jesus cured the daughter of the Canaanite woman from afar. This is one of only two miraculous cures of Jesus which he did from a distance, the other being the cure of the centurion’s servant. Both were cured from a distance unlike the miraculous cures of the sick among the Jews. Probably Jesus was telling them that indeed the Jews were the chosen people, that they are different from the rest of men, that indeed they are a people of special significance to God, a people peculiarly his own. But barring going into the miniscule details, barring peering into the microscope to spot the tiny differences that make us distinguish blacks from whites, fair haired from black haired, Canaanites from Jews, man from woman, when we look at things from afar, the peculiarities and the differences vanish into thin air.

I believe that there should be times in our lives when we have to do things and decide on them by looking from a distance rather than from the point of view of magnifying lens. There should be times in our lives when we have to look at things and people from a distance instead of peering and scrutinizing them, warts and all. There are things that we do and there are people that do not look as good as from a distance.
One can never really appreciate the beauty of a van Gogh nor the play of lights in a Renoir when you look at these up close. One has to step back ten paces in order to begin admiring their beauty, in order to begin seeing their beauty.

Just think about the many decisions that we made when we merely focused on a fault and missed the whole goodness that is bigger than the fault. Just think about the judgments we made when we trained our eye only on an irregularity or an idiosyncrasy, when beauty and goodness should have surrounded that person or that event. Just think about the so many biases we have created, the so many intrigues we have sown because we merely focused on his or her not so pleasing side.
That is why the song Bette Midler sung took as its refrain the main thought of the song which says:

God is watching us
God is watching us
God is watching us from a distance.

God is watching us from a distance, not because he is a distant God, not because he is somebody afar and separated from us, but because he sees the whole of us rather than just the not so pleasing part of us.

God can be so trusting because he can see the bigger picture of us and the events surrounding our lives. Why is it that God despite and in spite of us does not give up on us – why? Because he can see the bigger picture that is in us – that we are way, way more than the bad things that we do, and we are way, way more than the bad choices that we make once in a while. That is how she treated that Canaanite woman.

Jesus has done these miraculous cure from a distance in order to train our eyes by overcoming the details, the dichotomies, the differences, the divisions that we see up close; that from a distance the world looks blue and green, that from a distance we are all instruments, musical instruments marching in a common band, all in harmony, playing songs of hope, playing songs of peace, because in the end, when we look at things from a distance there is but one common desire and it is that desire that binds us as one.