visibility

So, I was going to write about Hagar, and that amazing moment in her story in which she

1. becomes the star of a story in which, up until now, she has been totally central as an object and utterly peripheral as an actual human being (welcome to Being Female; enjoy the next six millennia!)

and 2. not only renames God, but renames Him in reference to herself. For Hagar, God is, specifically, the God who sees [her].

I love this. I love that these moments of reversal, of subversion, don't start with advent  and Jesus but are the stuff the Bible was talking about all along. Without making any unequivocal claims about whether the Old Testament is intended to be a literal record of things that happened, let alone events that God endorsed (there's a lot of "sex with my dad" and "drunkenly sentencing my son's offspring to slavery" to understand it that way), I think that, as a story about what God is like, the Old Testament may be more illuminating when we focus less on the fact of God's vengeance and more on details like this.

It can be the case that terrible, painful things happen in the world and also that there is still meaning in the world, still an end towards which, from our limited perspective in this specific moment, we are all moving -- however many deserts and disasters we have to get through first. It can be the case that the complexity of an infinite God allows for these horrible moments without compromising that God's absolute goodness; that Hagar finds something more valuable in the desert than Sarah and Abraham could have given her by having slightly less horrifying understandings of labor relations. The total awesomeness in which Hagar is not only rescued but seen -- in which God hears her and sees her and extends to her her own version of the promise He made with Abraham -- it wouldn't exist or mean anything outside the imperfect system that put her at Abraham's mercy in the first place.

... anyway, I got sidetracked for a little bit by this bullshit (the modesty website itself, not Jen's enjoyable and trenchant mini-deconstruction of it). Because honestly, being visible is not all it's cracked up to be, when the one seeing you is not God but instead a bunch of consultants claiming to speak for Him. And the reactionary flavor of our entire culture right now -- evangelical Christianity included, though I think they're no better or worse than secular culture about trying to plant built their ideological castles on my body-sand -- makes me wish I could be the silver Human Being mascot on Community, instead of a human trying to live in this intractably female body.

But that stuff is small and temporary. And I am also seen by a God who isn't looking at, and does not care about, my boobs or my skirt or the opinions that your everyday Random Internet Stranger may have about either.

The absolute democracy with which the internet allows individuals to weigh in on the other people's wardrobes and bodies doesn't actually make those individuals more relevant. It's not me they are seeing when they look at my jeans or my swimsuit or my breasts as I use them to feed my child. From that angle, I think, they're not able to see me at all.