By Looking at the Eternal Face, We Find Our Own

By Aimee Byrd

Apr 07, 2025

Excerpted from Saving Face by Aimee Byrd, releasing on 8 April!!!

My college Childhood Psychology professor asked us all to conjure up our earliest memory. I had never thought about that before. I felt a little silly when it popped in my head. We had to share them with the class. Mine was just a glimpse of a flashback. I must have been three because we were still in our town house. Grandma and Pap Pap arrived with a Sit ’n Spin toy for me. I remember spinning and spinning—the freedom and joy of it. I remember Grandma watching me with delight. And that’s it.

That’s all I had to share with the class. Apparently, our earliest memory speaks to our personality. And there is three-year-old Aimee, spinning away. At least I wasn’t the guy who said his first memory was looking through the front window, watching his brother and dad play in the snow, feeling sad that he couldn’t join them. I bet he has a lot of psychological work to do! I’m awful like that, making fun of others to feel better about myself. Clearly there is much work to be done for me too.

But I’ve come to love little, spinning Aimee. This brief flashback has rich layers to it. My grandparents brought me a gift and reveled in my joy. I responded with joy—the joy of receiving, being loved, of loving things, of my hands grabbing onto the wheel, legs wrapped around tightly, and turning my whole body over and over. I had the freedom to move, as well as the freedom to delight and be delighted in. That’s a pretty great first memory.

It reminds me again of what Richard Rohr said: “We are mirrored not by concepts, but by faces delighting in us— giving us the face we can’t give to ourselves. It is ‘the face of the other’ that finally creates us and, I am sorry to say, also destroys us. It is the gaze that does us in!”[1]

It’s the gaze that does us in! A gaze has its own vocabulary. We learn more about ourselves from others’ gazes than we do by their words. The right side of the brain reads faces, and the face-reading right side is the turbo side. Jim Wilder shares:

It takes about 165 milliseconds (a sixth of a second) for a full round trip from one right brain to another right brain and back again. It will take our conscious mind 15 milliseconds longer to become aware that we have seen someone’s face. By then, a second round is already under- way. Through this fast-track “thinking,” the minds of two people begin to synchronize. In a matter of seconds, they are using the same circuits, matching chemistry, experiencing similar energy levels, and sharing one experience.

Right-to-right brain communication is rapid, authentic, and quite a bit faster than conscious thought can track. Consciously, we are too slow to fake our messages.[2]

The forty-three muscles on the face don’t lie. We are quick to pick up that face that is delighting in us, as we are constantly looking for it. As we mind-match with others, or develop mutual mind through the process Wilder explained, we make a third thing: us. A type of me drawn out of you and you drawn out of me. We find each other and ourselves and even God. He shows up on our faces. These micro-encounters shape our knowledge of the divine face that we image.

My earliest memory is a flashback of a micro-encounter I had with my dear grandma. It’s encoded in my explicit memory as a glimpse. But deep down, my implicit memory was already familiar with many earlier connections: Grandma and me sharing moments, making us. And God showed up in her delighting gaze. She mirrored his delight. The message was clear: You are beloved. I delight in seeing your joy. I am happy to be with you. Spin, Aimee, spin!

Place your mind before the mirror of eternity![3]

Clare of Assisi (1194–1253), one of the first followers of Francis of Assisi and founder of the Order of Poor Ladies for women in the Franciscan tradition, wrote the words above in a letter to Agnes of Prague. Clare picked up the same theme in a subsequent letter:

since he is the radiance of eternal glory is the brightness of eternal light and
the mirror without blemish.

Gaze upon that mirror each day . . .
and continually study your face in it . . .

Indeed,
in that mirror,
blessed poverty, holy humility,
and inexpressible charity shine forth as, with the grace of God,
you will be able to contemplate them throughout
the entire mirror.[4]

Jesus Christ is the mirror of God, the mirror of eternity. To look at him is to look at what is real. What do we see in the mirror? “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3). That line of Scripture always makes me pause in wonder. This is who we are called to look to: the radiance of God’s glory! But more than that, he is a wonder to behold. His is a face we can only see by contemplation now, but we long to see him looking at our face when all is set right. By looking into his eternal face, we find poverty, humility, and charity. St. Clare was passionate about living a life of poverty, as for her this is how the life of contemplation thrived. Ascetic living is a challenge to our thinking today. At least, it is for me. I don’t want to downplay her own focus on material poverty. It does make me think about how we loath poverty, fear it—but not only material poverty.

I never used to think of myself in the beatitudes. I would read it as Christ comforting the unfortunate with the promise of what is to come. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Matt. 5:3). Now I know in my body more of what it means to be poor in spirit. Your idea of security is stripped away. You experience a scarcity of sanctuary. When I felt that lack, I got a better look at the eternal mirror of the kingdom of heaven. We think we are living in the real now. We look to our work, our neighborhoods, our friendships, our church, our family, our healthy living, our quiet times, our networks. They assure us of our blessings. And gratitude for them is good and right. Experiencing disillusionment with the church and my friends helped me see that my “rich” picture was disillusioned already. The blessedness of poverty is being able to see what’s real and finding true riches. Seeing the blessedness of poverty in the eternal mirror is seeing that we are filled with Christ. He is the gift. He did not withhold himself when he took on flesh. His body is given for us, offered to us over and over again in holy sacrament to nourish us with himself. We need to look into this mirror and study our faces in it. Who are we before the poverty and richness of Christ?

St. Clare writes to her sisters that they are a mirror to one another and to others, so that those who see Christ in their faces will also become a mirror and testimony of Christ and the love he has for his people.[5]

By looking at the eternal face, we find our own.

1. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I Am That Which I Am Seeking, disc 3 (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2012), https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the -face-of-the-other-2019-0131/.

2. Jim Wilder, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard, and the Church That Transforms (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2020), 36.

3. Clare of Assisi, “The Third Letter to Agnes of Prague” (1238), in Clare of Assisi: The Lady, trans. and ed. Regis J. Armstrong, Early Documents, rev. ed. (New York: New City, 2006), 51.

4. Clare of Assisi, 55, emphasis original.

5. Clare of Assisi, 61.

Aimee Byrd is author, speaker, blogger, podcaster and former coffee shop owner. Aimee is the author of several books, including Saving Face, The Hope in Our Scars, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Sexual Reformation. Her articles have appeared in First Things, Table Talk, Modern Reformation, By Faith, New Horizons, Ordained Servant, Harvest USA, and Credo Magazine and she has been interviewed and quoted in Christianity Today and The Atlantic.

Find her on Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, and Substack.

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