Days after my last post, I am still reflecting on Sequoias, the same ancient ones I wrote of before. The very first time I visited these giants, I stood in awe of their vastness. I walked to the center of a grove off the beaten path, and there, surrounded by them, I turned toward one—and was met with a wound.
At the foot of the tree, the trunk opened into a blackened hollow, a cave of char I could nearly have stepped inside. Fire had been here. Above the hollow the bark rose in a long dark scar that reached, like a shadow, toward the light of the canopy. For a moment that was all I could see: this patient, towering being, burned. My first thought was the one we are each trained to think when we come upon a mark like this: something went wrong here.
I have been thinking about that wound, and my initial thought, a great deal lately. If I am honest, it is because I am standing in a fire of my own. There are parts of my life that feel like more than I know how to hold, and I keep returning, in my mind, to that scarred and living tree, as though it might teach me how to stand in what I cannot yet fathom, and perhaps even how to be remade by it.
So let me tell you what the Sequoia has been teaching me.
The giant Sequoia does not merely survive fire. It depends on it. Its bark, fibrous and nearly two feet thick, is made to char and hold, insulating the living tree within. Its cones can stay closed for years, waiting, until the heat of a passing fire dries them open and releases their seeds. That same fire clears the crowded floor of the forest, lays the bare soil open to the light, and returns its own ash as nourishment, so that what falls might root and rise. The scar I was grieving and the seedlings I could not yet see had come, somewhere, from the same flame. The wound and the gift had arrived together.
I stood there a long while that day, and now, as I reflect on it, the words of Bahá'u'lláh come to mind:
Gazing with the eye of absolute insight, the wayfarer... seeth in God's creation neither contradiction nor incongruity, and at every moment exclaimeth, "No defect canst thou see in the creation of the God of mercy. Repeat the gaze: Seest thou a single flaw?" He beholdeth justice in injustice, and in justice, grace.
In the past I’ve frequently wondered about that final line: He beholdeth justice in injustice, and in justice, grace. However, in this moment I’m also struck by Bahá'u'lláh’s invitation to look again. Repeat the gaze. My cursory glance had shown me only the burn. The second, all these years later, has shown me the forest the burn made possible. Neither view was untrue. But only the second was whole. And only the second was beautiful.
This, I am slowly coming to believe, is what justice most deeply is—not a verdict, but a way of seeing.
Much like my last post explored, we are used to imagining justice as a scale: a mechanism for weighing the wrongs committed by one against what is then owed to another—retribution at its finest, vengeance at its worst. This presupposes the trials and tribulations of our lives are the result of another’s actions. And in the ordering of our shared life that scale does have its place (more on this in a later post). But this is not where Bahá'u'lláh begins. In the Hidden Words He offers justice not as a measure to be enforced upon us, but as a gift to be received:
The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice... By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor.
Justice, here, is an eye. It is the capacity to see for oneself—clearly, honestly, without borrowing the secondhand sight of fear, or grievance, or the crowd. And the first thing such an eye must do is refuse to pretend. To behold justice in injustice is not to call the fire something gentler than fire. The scar is a real scar. The eye of justice does not soften the wound into something easier to look at; it looks straight at it, and names it, and only then keeps looking.
For the gift of that clear gaze is that it can penetrate further. Where the first look sees the offense, the repeated gaze begins to see the fullness of what, or who, caused it—not the deed alone, but the soul beneath the deed. 'Abdu'l-Bahá says it with a tenderness that disarms me every time:
Do not look at the shortcomings of anybody; see with the sight of forgiveness... The imperfect eye beholds imperfections. The eye that covers faults looks toward the Creator of souls.
This is why justice and forgiveness are never truly at war—it is not balance, but coherence we seek. They are the same eye at two depths. Justice sees the wound truly; forgiveness sees through it, to the one who is more than the wound. Forgiveness is not the surrender of clear sight—that would only be borrowing other eyes again, the very thing justice forbids. It is clear sight carried one step closer to compassion. In justice, grace.
I will not pretend this is easy. It is one thing to read a fire scar from the cool of a grown grove. It is another thing entirely to stand in the flame.
Most of the time, when we are wronged, or when life simply breaks against us, we are not the calm witness of some old, healed wound. We are inside the fire, and it burns. Bahá'u'lláh does not call our trials gentle:
My calamity is My providence, outwardly it is fire and vengeance, but inwardly it is light and mercy.
Outwardly fire. He says so plainly; the bitterness is named, not waved away. And yet, inwardly, mercy—the same flame that scars is the flame that opens the cone. Grief and sorrow, 'Abdu'l-Bahá tells us, do not come to us by chance, they are sent to us by the Divine Mercy for our own perfecting; the plant most pruned is the one that comes to bear the most abundant fruit. The medicine is bitter on the tongue. Its mercy is something most of us taste only later—when enough seasons have passed that we can repeat the gaze, and finally see what the fire was doing. I am not there yet with my own fire. Most days, I am simply still in it.
I hold one thing carefully here, because it is so easily misappropriated. This reading of the fire as mercy is a gift the soul learns to offer its own suffering. It is never a sentence to lay upon another's. To whisper this is my medicine to my own heart in the dark may be the beginning of healing; to say this is your medicine to someone in their grief may be experienced as a quiet cruelty. So I seek to turn the searching gaze first, and most gently, upon my own trials—and toward another's pain I strive to offer only tenderness.
I remember walking back through the grove that day as the light slanted low, past elders that had each, across their long lives, been opened by fire more than once. Every one of them carried a scar. Every one of them was still standing—not in spite of the burning, but in some expansive way because of it.
What beauty, I wonder even now, might be waiting in my own scars, if I were only willing to look again?
And yet one life in particular points past even this. There is a sight, I am learning, that lies at the intersection of both seeing truly and seeing through. Marjory Morten reached for it when she wrote of someone who had lived it:
To be hurt and to forgive is saintly, but far beyond this is the power to comprehend and not be hurt... It is not that we make the best of things, but that we may find in everything, even in calamity itself, the germ of enduring wisdom.
The germ. The seed. The very thing the fire-opened cone lets fall. To comprehend, Morten says, is not to grit our teeth and make the best of a bad thing; it is to find, folded inside the calamity itself, a living seed of wisdom already waiting on the heat. This is, perhaps, the practical expression of repeated gaze: not only to forgive the fire, but to comprehend it so wholly that it finds in us less and less it can wound.
Morten was not writing of an idea; she was writing of a beloved woman.
Bahíyyih Khánum—the Greatest Holy Leaf, the daughter of Bahá'u'lláh—was a small child in Tehran when her family was beggared in a single day and her father was cast into a lightless prison-pit. She left her home at seven and never had another. The rest of her long life, nearly eighty years, unfolded in exile and imprisonment, moving from city to city under guard, all the way to the prison-city of 'Akká. She buried a beloved brother within those prison walls. She later buried her father, and then her eldest brother who had become a second father to her. She met betrayal from within her own family. And through every loss the world can hand a person, she moved, by every account, serene and steadfast and unspeakably tender, the mother of every poor and grieving soul who found her door, never once known to complain or to lament.
Not, I think, because she felt nothing. She felt everything; she wept real tears over real graves. It is that she had learned to see the whole of it—the forces moving quietly through the long years of waiting—until the fire, which surely burned her, could no longer wound her. She is the proof I keep returning to: that this is not a lovely idea, but a thing a human being can actually do.
I have come to believe this is more than a private consolation. The Writings tell us that the very purpose of this age is the making of something new: Bahá'u'lláh speaks of a new creation, and Shoghi Effendi named the supreme work of this Day as nothing less than the calling into being of a new race of men. I used to imagine that as a distant people, arriving in some far-off century. Now I suspect it begins smaller and nearer than that—in the slow, unglamorous practice of learning to look again, of meeting a wound and refusing to stop at the first glance, refusing to inflict another one in return. Perhaps the new race is not a people spared the fire. Perhaps it is a people who have learned to see by its light.
My favorite poet of sorts, John O'Donohue, knew this practice by another name. He called it beautifying the gaze:
The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere... it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.
Is this not exactly what Bahá'u'lláh asked of the wayfarer—No defect canst thou see... Repeat the gaze? To beautify the gaze is to repeat it: to look at the scarred tree, the bitter season, the very wound, until the beauty that was hidden there all along rises to meet the eye. The graced eye and the just eye, I am learning, are the same eye. One sees truly; one sees tenderly; and somewhere in the long looking, they become a single sight.
And perhaps this is why, when Bahá'u'lláh gave us laws to live by—the just measures, the disciplines, the whole quiet architecture of a good life—He asked us to keep them not out of fear, and not to settle any account, but for the love of My beauty. Beneath the scale, beneath the law, beneath even justice itself, the foundation is not punishment. It is Beauty, and our love of it. The whole long practice of looking again is, in the end, a kind of love story: we learn to see truly because we have fallen for the beauty hidden in everything—even in calamity, even in the fire.
I am not Bahíyyih Khánum. I am still in the pit of my own fire, and most days I cannot yet see what it is for. There are mornings the weight of it feels like more than I can carry, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am beginning to understand that justice, at the level of the individual, has never been a scale I was meant to hold, weighing each wound against what it cost me. It is an eye I am slowly being taught to open—first to see truly, then to see through, and, if I am given grace and maturity enough, to see so wholly that the fire finds less and less in me to burn.
I do not have that sight yet. But I have a tree that was opened by fire and is still standing. I have words that promise the flame is, inwardly, light. I have the memory of a woman who walked through eighty years of burning and came out luminous. And I have this small, daily practice—to look again, and again, until the hidden beauty rises—which is becoming, even here in the smoke, something like a sanctuary.
So when the next fire comes, as it will, may I find the courage not to turn away, and not to look only once. May I learn to beautify the gaze.
May we repeat the gaze.
