There’s a quiet truth about the soul that we often forget in the noise of our days: what we take in becomes what we see. The images we scroll past, the stories we repeat, the voices that fill our feed: all of them polish or cloud the lens through which we look at the world.
The ancients called this contemplation. To see rightly, however, in our modern age, we often confuse seeing with consuming. We devour content without noticing how it begins to devour us back, reshaping our instincts, dulling our compassion, training our gaze toward cynicism or spectacle.
Richard Rohr suggests that the way we see anything is the way we see everything. I interpret this to mean that our perception is never neutral. Our lens is a moral instrument. It is formed by love or by fear, by humility or by ego. What we see, we slowly become.
The lens as sacrament
Karl Rahner, one of my favourite theologians, proposed that the Christian of the future will be a mystic – or will not exist at all. By this he did not mean that we all must live in cloisters, rather that faith will depend on our ability to see God in all things, not just in churches or in moments of comfort or need.
Rahner’s mysticism is incarnational. He invites us to perceive the divine shimmering in the ordinary, to look at the world through a sacramental lens. The sacrament is not a magical object; it is an awakening of the eye. The bread and wine do not change so much as we are changed in beholding them.
So too with the world. What we choose to watch, read, or listen to either sharpens our sight toward grace or dulls it toward despair. Every image we absorb can become a tiny liturgy, forming us for heaven or numbing us to it.
Reframing the feed
Perhaps, then, the work of faith in this digital age is not only prayer but curation. A kind of spiritual editing.
When Rohr speaks of the contemplative mind, he describes a way of seeing that is patient, non-dual, and deeply attentive. It does not rush to judgment. It notices what is beneath the surface. To cultivate such sight is to resist the algorithms that reward outrage and performative virtue. It is to let silence interrupt the scroll, and wonder interrupt certainty.
Maybe the holiest act today is not to post more, but to perceive better. To ask: does what I read make me kinder? Does what I watch awaken gratitude or greed? Do the voices I follow lead me closer to compassion or to contempt?
The Gospel of Seeing
The Gospels are, at their core, a story of vision. Blind men see. Fishermen recognize the risen Christ not by argument, but by the breaking of bread. Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener until she hears her name and her eyes are opened.
To see rightly is not to have all the facts, but to encounter the truth in flesh and dust. To look at the world and whisper, with Rahner, God is here.
The invitation of Advent and really, of every day that dawns, is to cleanse the lens. To let grace reframe the gaze, resisting cynicism with wonder. To guard with intent what enters the heart through the eyes and ears.
Because faith, like sight, is learned and evolving. And what we see most often, we eventually start to believe.
The Female Theologian 