On Invisibility

I remember the moment I realised I was becoming invisible, some years ago now: I had gone to the counter at a café to give in my order, and some young men came up beside me and captured the staff’s attention. This was a gentle surprise to me, though perhaps reasonable that young men be more noticeable than older women in most circumstances. Recently I began to think about invisibility again: when we are overlooked, or sitting by ourselves in a new place, or when what we do goes unregarded. A friend recently asked me to pray for her injured partner, saying, “Since I don’t go to church, I don’t have a right to pray, but you can.” Here the idea of invisibility to the church becomes invisibility to God.

            There can be pain in invisibility, but also advantages. Myths, folk tales and literature sparkle with stories of magic rings and cloaks of invisibility. As a street photographer, my invisibility allows me to appear just an insignificant tourist with a simple digital camera, where someone with heavy gear might be questioned or challenged. And people who think they’re being photographed may be frozen or awkward: the invisible camera can capture their real image. Nature photographers, after all, sit in blinds in hopes the wildlife won’t see them.

            Missing things are also invisible, it seems: the keys, the glasses, the timepiece. The notes on the page when the light shines in your eyes: since the piano teacher got a new light shining over my shoulder onto the page instead, the formerly invisible notes can be seen and so played. Then there are invisible thoughts, the thoughts we don’t see ourselves thinking. I have a lot of these thoughts around the anniversaries of deaths — marked in past centuries with family religious services — that cast a gloom over me days before, until I remember what the coming date recalls.

            Invisibility also has its dangers. The future, for example, is invisible, and the ancients believed it disrespectful to second-guess the intentions of God, hence in the Bible fortune-tellers, necromancers, and seers are generally in bad repute. The future itself came upon people from behind, and overtook them: a very different perception from the vista of a future spreading out before us today. Nevertheless our vista is filled with invisible events, both sinister and unexpectedly brilliant, and like the notes on the piano score, we won’t know them until we see them.

            Fortune-tellers are of course different from prophets, whose vision of the future is directed to rulers and their peoples, with the speech or voice given to prophecy by God. (God’s voice, or more accurately the echo of God’s voice — since human ears can’t hear divine speech — was called ‘the daughter of a voice’ and was spoken by an invisible speaker, as for example at Jesus’ Baptism and Transfiguration.) While the fortune-teller seeks to know, the prophet does know and what he or she does know is what you must do. In the canonical prophets, what you must do is most often called justice, although mercy is another requirement and these are not expected to be invisible.

            Invisibility can lead most usefully to humility. Humility is the natural state of humanity before the divine. The seeing should come from ourselves towards those rendered invisible by injustice and lack of mercy, and I fear that all too many examples will come to our minds, both now and in the future.