IN THE CITY OF MIAMI in the United States, a couple carried out a very interesting initiative: to surround eleven islands in Biscayne Bay with 6.5 million square feet of pink polypropylene. This work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, two married artists, was completed in May 1983 and could be seen for two weeks. It called the attention of the people of Miami (locals as well as tourists) to a series of small islands practically no one had noticed. They were there, forming part of the scenery, but everyone had become so used to them that they were not valued. The huge pink mesh that surrounded them turned everyone’s eyes toward the natural beauty of those little islands, allowing them to stop being familiar and inviting to be seen with new eyes that revalued them. It was like rediscovering what had always been there, even before the people were.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude did the same thing with the Pont-Neuf in Paris, which they wrapped in 450,000 square feet of sandstone-colored fabric in 1985; with the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, in 1995, for which they used one million square feet of fabric; and with Berower Park in Basel, Switzerland, in 1998, covering its 178 trees with silver-colored polyester fabric and 14.3 miles of rope. For some weeks, all these works of architecture and nature received the attention of people who, accustomed to passing by them every day, had stopped seeing them with new eyes, and had therefore stopped appreciating them properly.
Don’t you think that the same thing is happening to us concerning Jesus? Don’t you think that the figure of Jesus can become so familiar to us that we do not value it fairly? Could it be that we have become so accustomed to the same phrases as always that they themselves hide from our eyes what Jesus really is and means? Is it possible that Jesus has lost His radiance for us in our daily lives because of habit? We must learn to see Him with new eyes, in a different way, so that that new vision takes us out of our spiritual lukewarmness. Revelation is ideal reading to help us achieve it.
«Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time is near» (Revelation 1:3).