Being seen

“Thou God seest me.” My Grandma on my dad’s side embroidered that and had it framed. The cloth she embroidered on was an old shirt of my Grandpa’s.

The words are from Genesis, Chapter 16. Hagar, a slave, has been used and mistreated by the great patriarch Abram/Abraham and his wife, Sarai/Sarah. They have used her as a surrogate to bear Abraham a child. Abraham has used her as a concubine, but once she is pregnant, Sarah mistreats her and Abraham does not interfere. So she runs away, but she encounters the angel of the Lord, who tells her to return to Abraham and Sarah and prophesies that the child she carries will have countless descendants.

The God Who Sees Me by Patricia Ewing

The King James Version of the Bible then says, “And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.” The New International Version has, “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me.’” (This is verse 13.)

Yesterday, I went to look something up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is online at the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. I browsed my way into the section on Christian prayer. In defining prayer, the Catechism alludes to the story of the woman at the well (John 4), where Jesus begins a conversation with the woman by asking for a drink of water. The Catechism says:

Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.

I also watched a video, “How God speaks to us in daily life.” A priest in Great Britain, Father Stephen Wang, has a Youtube channel called Pause for Faith. In this particular video, his discussion of prayer draws on the story of two of John the Baptizer’s disciples who follow Jesus—literally—after John points him out as the Lamb of God (John 1). Father Wang dwells on the fact that, as they walk behind him, Jesus turns around and sees them and asks, “What do you want?” So, again, the emphasis is on the Lord’s initiative: he turns around and he sees them. 

It is a commonplace in psychology that people want to be seen, that being seen is a basic human need. If we feel invisible, unlooked for, unseen, we can remember this name of the Lord:

Thou God seest me.