2D vs. 3D (by Aaron Visser)

The 2D Eulogy

Sometimes remembering someone who has passed is like looking at an autostereogram.

You might ask, “What’s an autostereogram?”  You may know it by its more popular title: Magic Eye.

Autostereograms, or Magic Eyes, are pieces of art composed of thousands of different colored dots and lines.  Depending on how you focus your eyes, you will either see a 2D image or a 3D one.  I’m not sure about the whole science of it all, but it seems to meet that if you are willing to look past the image – and focus on something behind it –  you are more able to see the 3D image.

(For more information regarding autostereograms, please check out your local Hyperlink.)

Recently, I have read several blog and social media posts about great men of our time who have passed on.  One was an article about C.S. Lewis, posted by John Blake.  Blake’s post, titled The C.S. Lewis You Never Knew, presents a rather disjointed view of Lewis. It takes bits and pieces from excellent biographies of Lewis’ life and endeavors to summarize all of them in approximately 1800 words.  He attempts to humanize Lewis as he paints the good and the bad about a man who is almost larger than life.  While ending on a heartfelt note, the article still feels incomplete.

Another writing I came across was a post on Facebook responding to the outpouring of social media in response to the death of Nelson Mandela. It commented how people seem to forget that Mandela was jailed as a terrorist, and it sarcastically called for bombing buildings to be fairly included in his legacy.

I do not agree with the post by any means. As someone who traveled to South Africa and visited the town where Mandela cast his ballot in his own presidential election, I do not believe he was a terrorist.  After reading that post, though, I did a little research, and I came across this article by Michael Moynihan, warning readers to not be so quick to put a halo of Mandela’s head.  Moynihan reminds readers that Mandela was fond of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and often referred to Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi as “Brother Leader of the Revolution of the Libyan Jamahariya.”

Moynihan’s article, the Facebook post, and Blake’s article about Lewis caused me to think about how we, the living, try to remember the dead.  Do these brief writings, or any other articles, blog posts, or short biographies, really capture the life of men who lived for so long and did so much?

When remembering someone who has passed, we discredit them if we look at their legacies like we do an autostereogram.  We glance at it, move closer to it, and inspect each dot and line. All along, we are thinking that we are seeing the whole picture.  However, we do not realize that beneath the 2D image we see, there lies a whole new dimension.

Trying to summarize a person’s life in a short article is like providing a 2D eulogy.  We take thoughts, actions, and ideas from a certain point in someone’s life and use it to paint their whole legacy.  As a lover of Lewis, I admit that he has published some pretty astonishing things.  Before he was a Christian, he wrote some inflammatory remarks about faith and God. Even after his conversion, the way he treats women in some of his writings makes me cringe.

Would I call Lewis a chauvinist?

No. I would not.

Read A Grief Observed. Or Till We Have Faces. Or The Great Divorce. How Lewis treats females in these writings seems to contradict what we read in other writings.

The same is true with Mandela. Can I deny that Mandela made some dangerous, and maybe even terrorist-type decisions, when he was younger? Can I ignore that he had some rather unattractive political ties? I can’t. However, would I ever be willing to call Mandela a terrorist?  No. I would not.

Look at Mandela’s political policies later in life, and remember his fight against HIV/AIDs.  When we choose to look at the complete picture, we have a more complete understanding of who these men were.

In college, I was completely against drinking alcohol. Now I serve it for a living. That was also the time in my life when I thought women shouldn’t be pastors. Now I am married to one.  Over time, as I grew, matured, and changed, so did my perspective.

So it goes for us all.

Our lives are not lived in two dimensions. What you see is not what you get.  It is only when we look further, past the individual moments, that we fully see the picture. In my opinion, understanding Lewis’ and Mandela’s shortcomings makes their accomplishments even more impressive. Connecting individual moments and examining context helps us understand the whole picture. Like a Magic Eye, it gives us depth and a new view.

Let us stop issuing 2D eulogies and find the magic in a deeper perspective.