The eyes have it

Here is the red-tailed hawk viewed from the front. She certainly kept her hawk-eyes on me while I wandered around under her tree!

(See her back here.)

Establishing eye contact is very powerful.  Much can be communicated through the eyes.  Think of those shared glances between parents, lovers, friends, fellow workers, neighbors, anybody. We talk to one another with our eyes.  We share a laugh, we express alarm, we smile, we seethe, we welcome, we show delight, we dismiss.

That's a little more difficult with animals. Their eyes are not as expressive, and we don't know their language anyway.  Nor they ours.

And yet, sometimes one does make a connection of some kind.

And it can be powerful, too.  Two beings, so different from one another, make contact.  They acknowledge one another. They watch one another - maybe out of fear or wariness or just curiosity. Maybe even with amusement or affection.  I remember reading about a diver who made such a connection with a whale, which swam up to him and calmly looked at him with its huge eye.

Is this why we anthropomorphize God? So that we can imagine God as a person we can communicate with, whose eyes we can look into and decipher some meaning there?  So that God will have something we can connect with ourselves?

Perhaps that's why we love Jesus.....