Seest Thou This Woman?

I recently read the book The Enchantress of Crumbledown to my children.  It is a story of three runaway foster children who hide in an abandoned house in a forest and find it is being lived in by a mysterious old lady named Cassie.  The book recounts the marvelous way in which she brought the world to life for them, inspiring them to dream big, develop their talents, and savor the beauty around them.  They learned to live off of the fruits and fish and other things in nature around them, and she changed the way they saw the world by bringing joy and excitement to even the most mundane activities, showing them unbounded love and confidence.  One of the boys described it afterwards saying that from her they learned how to live.  The children came to love her fiercely, but eventually they were found by the police and they learned that Cassie had run away from a home for the mentally ill.  She was subsequently taken back there and judged to be a crazy lady by most around her.  As the children were discussing her with a social worker, the latter said, “That poor old Denner woman, not even in her right mind….  You must realize that she is, after all, a very, very strange lady.”  The six-year-old who had come to love her so much responded wisely, “If you think something’s weird, it’s because you don’t really understand it.”  The story was a reminder to me of the way our world so often judges people to be strange or crazy or worthless because they don’t conform to the norm around them.  We often can’t get past some initial abnormality to see the beauty of their soul.  There are many Cassie’s who have so much good to offer the world, but, like the Savior, we “judge [them] to be a thing of naught” and they aren’t given a chance (1 Nephi 19:9).

               The Savior’s life was often focused on reaching out to just that group of people.  He sought to bless the lives of those who were largely rejected by the society around Him, ministering to the children, the poor, and the sinners.  Luke recorded one such incident when the Savior was in the house of a Pharisee: “And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:37-39).  This Pharisee, Simon, could not see the good work she was doing for the Lord because he was so focused on her abnormalities, her sins.  But the Savior sought to turn the man’s focus to show him the soul of this daughter of God.  Simon judged her to be a woman not worth even associating with, and Jesus in turn praised her and taught Simon to see her differently: “Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment” (Luke 7:44-46).  That first question is a powerful one—the Lord invites us with all of those we meet, “Seest thou this woman?” or “Seest thou this man?”  We often will see only how they are different, how they are lacking or strange in this way or that, but the Lord wants us to see them like He saw this woman at the Pharisee’s house.  As He said long ago to Samuel He says to all of us in our interactions with the marginalized of society: “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).