We Need To See Each Other Face to Face

 Maureen Mullarkey tells us What Hiding Our Faces Tells Us About the Condition Of Our Souls. The face of a newborn has barely any distinguishing features. But as the face ages, it takes on lines, wrinkles, and other distinctive features, some of which no doubt are due to that person's life experiences.

Here within the orbit of Manhattan, masks are not merely tolerated; they are embraced. Obedience to Covidian biopolitics elevated masking to a sacramental act. It has become the secular analogy to sprinkling holy water or making the sign of the cross.

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Instead, the tenor of our faces—their expressive tonality—is formed and fixed in the furnace of living. The lived life is a kiln that consumes facile ideas about how to create, or maintain, mortal beauty. Only moral imagination resists the old pagan cult of the body with its fixation on health and material beauty.

At a certain age, mother insisted, every face is stamped—who knows how?—with the character of our choices, of what we have found worthy of praise or blame. It is inflected by those things we pity and those we censure or resent. In the eyes of this Ursuline nun, a face is the work of our minds. Incised on it is the texture and reach of our hearts. Call it soulcraft.

The other day I saw a coworker in the break room without a mask for the first time. Her face was lovely, and I told her so. We should all see each other face to face.