FACES
Robert Meyers

Perhaps no one quite understands why certain moments in his life or in his reading have been memorable beyond others. One has a tendency to remember odd things, little bits and pieces that were not of any special importance even in the event or book where he found them. But they stick in the mind like burrs to nylon socks.

Such a moment came for me many years ago when I first read Thomas Wolfe’s description of the face of one of his teachers. He said that the man’s face was one on which the fierce condor, Thought, had preyed. And suddenly there was invoked for me an image of a thought-ravaged face, marked by the insistent, troubling demands of the mind at work.

Ever since, with considerable awareness of what I am doing, I have looked for those thought-ravaged faces. Eyes that brood with compassion for the endless struggles and the monumental ignorance of mankind. Lips that betray a curve of anguish for the always-breaking heart. A brow that shows the claw marks of Wolfe’s bird.

Naturally I have tended to contrast another sort of face with this one. The complacent, smug, self-assured face of the man who battles nothing. The eyes that have looked upon too many easy victories and grown calculating. The lips that have learned to shape themselves to whatever mold is fashionable for acceptance. The brow that seems unmarked by meditation, by analysis, by agonies of doubt.

I remember a play by James Barrie in which some character laments the loss of the “bright boy face” when he meets again, in later life, a friend he had known when young. I have had that experience. I have remembered a face alive and eager, thrusting forward almost in its ardor to know and experience. And then, years later, I have met its owner and found to my dismay that it had settled into heavy, fat lines of complacency, quite ready to take the world on the world’s terms.

Yet it has nothing to do with age, of course. For some I know at eighty have that keen, bright, eager look upon their faces. For them, the great adventure of knowing and experiencing has never grown dull. They are blessed.

Some people have no absolutes, no real convictions. And as the years pass, the faces of these people grow slack and weak. Futility is written large upon them. But a man of principle, a man who has suffered (as men of principle always do) for his convictions - that man’s face shows increasing nobility and majesty as the years pass.

I am, then, a face-watcher. I have been for most of my adult life. Always, in the pulpit, before I rise to speak, my eyes look for faces that are alive, eager, curious, and thoughtful. And when I go where other ministers are, I always look for what shows on their faces. I am so often disappointed that it makes me glad I cannot see my own.

Believing devoutly that thought really does leave its mark, I am surprised at the frequent absence of any such mark on faces that ought most to show it. How can a man’s face be bland and smooth and unmarked by the claw marks of agony who says that he speaks for God? I cannot but think that any thoughtful preacher’s face would grow more and more brooding and compassionate as he worked among men until at last he would bear some resemblance to Lincoln.

And from such a face, one believes, there would come words of slow and quiet wisdom. Not glib phrases that trip across the tongue as if they had no real acquaintance with the hot forges of thought, but words carefully delivered as if each one came newly forged from the molten soul of the man.

Such words come from the depths of what one is, and if at bottom there is nothing then one must borrow from some shelf of easy access. A friend of mine likes to talk of what he calls the “sense of the tragic.” He feels that many of our people lack a real comprehension of the tragic aspects of human existence, that they do not feel the confusion, the fear, the heartache of others.

He and I agree that it is futile to seek help from a face unmarked by a sense of the tragic, since it cannot help us. We turn instead to a face on which that fierce condor has preyed, and across which the shadow of pain and sadness has fallen. We have learned that one can make a pretty good guess about what a man will be able to give, just by looking carefully at his face.

Sir Thomas Browne wrote once: “It is the common wonder of all men how among so many millions of faces there should be none alike.” True indeed, and what a wealth of information those unique faces reveal!