There is a cathedral outside of Reims, France that has stood for eight hundred years. Kings were crowned there. Peace treaties were signed inside its walls. The first Gothic statue in history to wear a smile looks out from its stone face at everyone who passes. None of that is visible if you walk in without a guide. You see old stone and dim light and stained glass, the way you see anything you don’t have language for yet. It takes someone who has given their life to knowing that place to show you what you’re actually standing inside of.
Presence isn’t the same as understanding. You can walk through something extraordinary and come out the other side having only seen the surface of it, because you didn’t have anyone to show you what you were looking at.
Miriam and Aaron were as close to Moses as you could get. They had watched the sea split. They had eaten the bread that showed up on the ground each morning. But proximity had curdled into something else: the particular blindness that comes from thinking that because you are near something, you understand it. They looked at Moses and saw only Moses. The guide was right in front of them, and they had stopped seeing him as one.
I think about the people in my own life who have been that for me, who looked at what I was walking through and said, here, let me show you what you’re actually standing inside of. Not to make it easier. Just to make it legible. There is something about being known by someone with that kind of vision that steadies you, even when nothing around you has changed. Especially then.
You don’t always get to choose who that person is. Sometimes the guide arrives before you know you need one. But I have learned, slowly, and sometimes at cost, that the thing to do when you find someone who can see what you can’t yet is not to argue with their vantage point. It’s to stay close enough to learn what they see.
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