🙏 The Same Scene
What we miss when we’re sure of what we saw
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” —Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (1961), citing Talmudic tradition
“This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand” (Matthew 13:13, ESV).
Two friends stood on the same stretch of beach in Indialantic last week, watching the water. One said the tide was coming in. The other was certain it was going out. Same ocean, same morning, same sand under their feet. They were both confident. At least one of them was wrong. They laughed about it and kept walking, coffee in hand, pelicans overhead. Neither thought to check.
In 1999, researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris showed volunteers a short video of people passing basketballs. Count the passes made by the team in white, they were told. While they counted, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, thumped their chest, and walked off. Half the viewers didn’t notice the gorilla. Not a brief glimpse they forgot. They missed it entirely. When shown the video again, most refused to believe it was the same tape.
Researchers call this inattentional blindness, and we pay a steep price for it beyond the laboratory. The Innocence Project has documented more than 375 DNA exonerations in the United States, and eyewitness misidentification was a factor in roughly 69 percent of them. People who were certain of what they witnessed sent innocent strangers to prison. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated how it happens. Show people the same car accident and ask how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other, and they’ll estimate higher speeds and later “remember” broken glass that was never there. The verb in the question reshaped the memory.
We have been naming this problem for a long time. The prophet Isaiah wrote it twenty-seven centuries ago: “You will indeed see but never perceive.” Jesus quoted the same line to his own followers. Kierkegaard added the reason: Life can only be understood backwards, yet it must be lived forwards. We are always inside the scene, never above it. Sherlock Holmes put it most bluntly to Watson: “You see, but you do not observe.”
Which brings us to a road outside Jerusalem on a Sunday afternoon, nearly two thousand years ago.
A crowd lined the path, waving palm branches, shouting for a king. They expected a liberator arriving in triumph. The disciples walking beside him recognized their teacher heading into danger. The Roman soldiers watching from the fortress above identified a potential riot. Same road, same dust, same afternoon sun. Three groups, three entirely different realities, each one shaped by what they carried into the moment rather than what the moment actually held.
Palm Sunday is a story about how human beings see. Selectively, confidently, and often incorrectly. Every one of those groups would have passed a lie detector test. They all believed what they witnessed.
We enter this Holy Week carrying an uncomfortable possibility. The thing you’re most certain about might be the thing you’re most wrong about. The crowd wasn’t lying. They weren’t careless. They were filtering, the way we all filter, every day, on every road we walk.
The question worth carrying into this week goes deeper than what do you see.
What might you be choosing to miss?
This article appeared in FLORIDA TODAY as What might you be choosing to miss | Spirituality Today.
I ride several mornings a week. Almost always in the same direction around a number of loops. I did not read this until I got home, but It resonated since, this mroning we elected to "go backwards". One effect is that the anhingas don't see you coming as they leave their roost and almost fly into me. I gues we have to think about that route....