Seeing Things | The Road is Already There

Two travelers walk miles with a stranger, their eyes somehow unable to recognize who he is… until suddenly, they do. Like a Magic Eye image, beauty and meaning are often already present; sometimes we just need to soften our gaze to recognize it.

 

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TRANSCRIPT:

"The Road Is Already There: Waking Up to Beauty"

Opening:: The Magic Eye

Show Magic Eye… bring a couple ppl up to “race”... ask what their “trick” is…

Do you all know what this is? Maybe if you’re like me, you also know the particular frustration of standing in front of one of these and seeing absolutely nothing. Just noise. Just chaos. Everyone else around you is gasping and pointing — I see it, I see it — and you're standing there thinking: there is nothing there. This is a scam!

And then — maybe — something shifts. You relax your eyes. You soften your gaze. You stop trying so hard to find it. And suddenly, almost against your will: there it is. A dolphin. A spaceship. A whole three-dimensional world that was present the entire time, completely invisible until you stopped straining to see it.

The image was always there. You just needed a DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING.

That's the story we're sitting with today.

The Story: Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35)

It's the same day as the resurrection. Two of the people who had been learning from Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus — about seven miles away (from here to downtown Hopkins, or here to the State Fair). One is named Cleopas, and he’s traveling with another person the author of this book leaves out…

They are walking away. Away from the city where everything fell apart. Away from the site of the execution. Away from the tomb and the wild, confusing reports the women brought back that morning that nobody quite knew what to do with.

They're processing. Talking through the wreckage. And a stranger falls into step beside them along the road.

The stranger asks what they're talking about. And they stop — looking downcast — and say: are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn't know what happened? There's something almost darkly funny about that. They proceed to explain the whole story to Jesus. He listens. Then he walks them through the scriptures, reframing everything.

They reach Emmaus as evening falls. The stranger acts as if he's continuing on — and they say: stay with us. It's getting late.

He stays. They sit down to eat. He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it to them.

And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.

And he vanished.

They turn to each other: weren't our hearts burning within us while he talked to us on the road?

They had been walking with him the whole time and couldn't see it. Until the bread broke, and their eyes softened, and there it was.

What They Were Walking Away From

I want to sit with this story and look at it through the lens of liberation for a moment, because it matters who these people are and what they were carrying.

Cleopas says to the stranger: we had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. The Greek word there — lytrōo — means to liberate from an oppressive situation. To set free. These weren't abstract spiritual hopes. They were political hopes. They had hoped this was the one who would break the power of Rome, dismantle the systems of domination, set the occupied people free.

And instead he was executed, in an extremely public, humiliating way Rome had devised specifically to crush movements and make examples of leaders.

So they're walking away not just from grief, but from the particular grief of crushed political hope. The grief of people who believed change was possible and watched it get squashed.

That is not a distant or unfamiliar grief. Many of us carry some version of it. And the story doesn't say: get over it. Go back. Pretend it didn't happen. The story says: a stranger joins you in it. Listens to you talk through it. And eventually — in the act of sharing a meal with an unexpected guest — something you couldn't see before comes into focus.

Paying Attention as a Practice

Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist, writer, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation) has spent her life arguing that attention is not PASSIVE. It is an act. A PRACTICE. A form of reciprocity.

In her framework, drawn from Indigenous ways of knowing, the world is already speaking. Already offering gifts. The question is not whether beauty and meaning are present — they are. The question is whether we have learned, or been willing, to receive them. She writes that paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world — receiving its gifts with open eyes and open heart.

This is exactly what the Emmaus story is about. The beauty — the presence — was already there on the road. It had been there for seven miles. In this story, the disciples' eyes were, as Luke puts it, kept from recognizing him. Not because the presence was absent. Because something in their grief, their exhaustion, their framework kept them from seeing what was right in front of them.

The Magic Eye image was already there. Their gaze just hadn't softened yet.

And here's the liberationist move in Kimmerer's thinking that connects directly to this story: the practices that train us to notice beauty, to receive gifts, to recognize interconnection — those practices are not luxuries for people who have the time and leisure to be contemplative. They are, she argues, acts of resistance against systems that profit from our disconnection. A culture that keeps us distracted, anxious, consuming, competing — that culture depends on us not noticing the gifts that are already here. Not recognizing each other. Not seeing the fire that was already burning on the shore.

Defiant attention is a revolutionary act.

The Meal As the Moment

Notice where recognition happens in this story. Not during the stimulating conversation while they were on the road — though something was stirring (weren't our hearts burning?). Not through an argument or a proof. Not through a performance of power.

Recognition happens at a table. When food is distributed and shared. When a stranger is invited to stay and then becomes the host.

This is how the writer of Luke tells the entire story of Jesus. Over and over, the pivotal moments happen around food. The outcast is seen at a dinner party. The lost son is welcomed home with a feast. The thousands are fed with what seemed like not enough. And now: Jesus, once again in their presence, is recognized in the breaking of bread.

From a womanist perspective, [[every table can be a SACRED SPACE.]] It is where bodies gather. Where hunger is acknowledged. Where the work of sustaining life happens. Where people who might otherwise stay strangers become known to each other.

And in this story, it's a table in an ordinary house in an ordinary village, with two grieving, exhausted travelers who thought to offer hospitality to someone they didn't yet recognize. The beauty was in the ordinary. The coming back to life was in a meal. The recognition was in the distribution of food.

What This Asks of Us…

So what does it mean to live with a softened gaze — especially right now, in a world that gives us a thousand reasons every day to harden?

Here’s what I think: it doesn't mean ignoring the hard things. These disciples didn't ignore them. They talked about them for seven miles. They named the execution. They named the dashed hope. They named the confusion & chaos. Soft gaze is not the same as averted gaze. You can see the wound clearly and refuse to let the wound be the only thing you see.

What Kimmerer points to, and what this story enacts, is something like this: the world is more beautiful and more interconnected than the loudest voices in our culture want us to believe. The story of scarcity, isolation, and meaninglessness is not the whole story — and insisting on that, quietly and stubbornly, in the way we pay attention and share meals and recognize each other, is a form of resistance.

What would it mean to be defiant in our insistence that beauty is real? That connection is real? That everything actually is interconnected? That a stranger on the road might be carrying something we need?

The disciples had to invite the stranger to stay before their eyes opened. Hospitality preceded recognition. They didn't know who he was when they said come in, stay with us, it's getting late. They just knew the evening was coming and there was room.

Closing Practice

One practice this week… Soften your gaze once — deliberately — at something you usually rush past on the way to something else. A person. A tree. A meal. A moment with someone you love. A moment with a stranger. The view out a window you stopped noticing.

Don't try to extract meaning from it. Don't analyze it. Just let it be there. Let yourself receive it… And notice: was something already present that you hadn't been still enough to see?

The road is already there. The stranger is already walking beside you. The bread is about to break.

You already have eyes to see it…! May it be so.