1: Journalist and author David Brooks was intimidated.
He was interviewing a ninety-three-year-old Black woman named LaRue Dorsey at a local diner in Waco, Texas.
A former teacher, LaRue “presented herself to me as a stern drill sergeant type, a woman, she wanted me to know, who was tough, who had standards, who laid down the law,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person.
“I loved my students enough to discipline them,” she told him.
At that moment, Jimmy Dorrell entered the diner.
Jimmy “is a teddy-bearish white man in his sixties,” David writes, “who built a church for homeless people under a highway overpass, who leads a homeless shelter by his house, who serves the poor.”
Jimmy and LaRue had worked together on various community projects over the years.
Jimmy “saw her across the room and came up to our table smiling as broadly as it is possible for a human face to smile,” David notes.
“Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her way harder than you should ever shake a ninety-three-year-old.
“He leaned in, inches from her face, and cried out in a voice that filled the whole place: “Mrs. Dorsey! Mrs. Dorsey! You’re the best! You’re the best! I love you! I love you!”
What happened next?
“I’ve never seen a person’s whole aspect transformed so suddenly,” David writes. “The old, stern disciplinarian face she’d put on under my gaze vanished, and a joyous, delighted nine-year-old girl appeared.”
2: Jimmy is what David calls “an Illuminator.” These are people who “have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others,” he writes.
“They shine the brightness of their care on people and make they fell bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.”
Illuminators bring a focused type of attention to the people they meet. And, in so doing, they bring forth an elevated version of that person.
“That gaze, that first sight, represents a posture toward the world,” David suggests. “A person who is looking for beauty is likely to find wonders, while a person looking for threats will find danger.
“A person who beams warmth brings out the glowing sides of the people she meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached.”
“Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
David’s point? “The quality of our lives depends upon a bit on the quality of attention we project our onto the world.”
3: How Jimmy shows in the world starts with what he believes about other people.
“Jimmy is a pastor,” David notes. “When Jimmy sees a person—any person—he is seeing a creature who was made in the image of God. As he looks into each face, he is looking, at least a bit, into the face of God.
“When Jimmy sees a person, any person, he is also seeing a creature endowed with an immortal soul—a soul of infinite value and dignity.
“When Jimmy greets a person, he is also trying to live up to one of the great callings of his faith: He is trying to see that person the way Jesus would see that person. He is trying to see them with Jesus’s eyes—eyes that lavish love on the meek and the lowly, the marginalized and those in pain, and on every living person.
“When Jimmy sees a person, he comes in with the belief that this person is so important that Jesus was willing to die for their sake. As a result, Jimmy is going to greet people with respect and reverence.
“That’s how he’s always greeted me,” David writes.
Now, we might be “an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or something else,” he notes, “but this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person we meet, is a precondition for seeing people well.”
Even if someone finds “the whole idea of God ridiculous,” David suggests we consider “the concept of a soul.”
Imagine we are talking with someone about sports or the weather. David asks us “to assume that the person in front of us contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity.
“If we consider that each person has a soul, we will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them. We will be aware that, at the deepest level, we are all equals. We’re not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls.
“If we see the people we meet as precious souls,” he writes, “we’ll probably wind up treating them well.”
Indeed.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What is my default way of showing up with other people? What quality of attention am I projecting onto the world?
Action: Journal about my answers to the questions above.
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