Writing has been my art form for many years now, but watching the Cause: You’re Beautiful video has catapulted me back to my former life as a visual artist. Decades ago, I made my living through illustration and graphic design, but what I most loved was painting portraits from life, capturing that little arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth that conveys so much, a haiku that speaks volumes.

We would chat as I set my easel close to my sitter’s face, as I readied the paints and brushes and strong-smelling oils and turpentine in their glass jars, as I found a pile of clean rags. At first, there might be a slight unease, the same darting uncertainty some women in the video exhibited in brief off-camera glances, in shy, fluid smiles. But as I held the sitter in my gaze, mixing pigments and making my first marks on the panel, we would relax into companionable chatter. The rest of the world disappeared, leaving two human beings, face-to-face and soul-to-soul for hours that sometimes passed so quickly we couldn’t believe the clock.

The oddest thing about the whole experience was this: some of my sitters were people I didn’t much like. They’d seen someone else’s portrait, or heard me talk about my work, then came forward to offer themselves as subjects. This was no small thing—someone might sit for as many as a dozen long sessions before a picture was done to my satisfaction. For both of us, it was a commitment to intimacy, one I sometimes made despite reservations: did I really want to spend that much time with So-and-so, a person I’d found annoying in the past? In the beginning, I put away my reservations out of necessity. I was hungry for subjects and couldn’t afford to pass up an opportunity.

But after a few such experiences, I came to realize there was no need to worry. To paint a face, I needed to open my senses, heart, mind and spirit to the story that face had to tell. After an hour peering at the way the flesh at the corner of an eye caressed the orbital bones, or tracing the shape into which a mouth had settled after a lifetime of smiles, pouts and grimaces, I could never help myself. Inevitably, I fell a little in love with my sitter. Sometimes a soft erotic charge buzzed through the channel my gaze had opened between painter and subject. But most often, it was that deep affection and acceptance the Greeks called agape. What flowed between us was a mutual desire for the other’s well-being and a shared pleasure in that desire that made us sorry when the painting was done and sitting knee-to-knee must come to an end.

Much later, I took part in a meditation group guided by a gifted teacher, Rabbi David A. Cooper, who helped me glimpse myself in the golden light of agape. He invited participants to imagine a house in a lovely setting, and then to enter in turn a sequence of rooms, each of which would reveal an image of divinity. When he asked us to gaze through a window at a manifestation of God, I saw what for me has always been the most powerful symbol of spirit, light on water—specifically, sunlight sparkling on the Pacific. In the final room, he invited us to look into a mirror, where we would see ourselves through the eyes of God, however we understood that. As soon as I brought my attention to the task, a mental image of piercing clarity emerged: I saw myself as an ideal parent might regard a beloved child. All my flaws shrank to darling foibles, all my ambitions became sweet stumbles toward growth. It was my first experience of seeing myself without criticism, without judgment, in the undiluted light of love.

All my life, I have been interested in politics. Not so much the horse races and horse trades of electioneering, but the worthy and challenging problem of collective existence: how we are to live together, to find a modus vivendi that neither suppresses our very real differences nor makes them into reasons to spill blood? I sought “the redemptive community” Reverend James Lawson characterized in the 1960 founding statement of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, a civil rights group) as “a social order of justice permeated by love.” Much of my work, then and now, has been with artists who have chosen to place their gifts at the service of social justice, and who believe it is in the public interest to cultivate the imagination and empathy that can be learned from making art. (You can read more about it at my Website.) Back in the seventies, when I spent most of my time as an activist—running from this meeting to that strategy session, then returning to my brushes and paints and the special communion of the portrait sitting—there was something slightly suspect about my art. Why was I so engaged with this solitary subject, the single human face, when humanity in all its multiplicity was far more worthy of attention?

But eventually I came to see that there was no contradiction at all. The antidote to the objectification that allows human beings to treat each other as things is to see each others’ faces as I did in my painting studio — as I did through God’s eyes — as the container for a spirit that is whole and holy and beautiful beyond belief, regardless of the scars life has left on the body encasing it. I understood then that it would be my task to call attention to the moments in our individual lives that resonate with the grand-scale stories shaping our collective reality, so that each small story would open a door to the world.

I enjoyed every frame of the Cause: You’re Beautiful video, but the parts that touched me most were the unguarded moments when decorum gave way to a sigh, or an unbidden tear, or a flicker of wry self-regard. I watched it in turn with a few friends, gauging their reactions. There were moments — not always the same moments — when each friend gave a little gasp of recognition, murmured assent or clapped her hand to her breastbone, an exclamation without words. In such moments, we are given the opportunity to recapture with new eyes a redemptive vision of beauty that busyness or fatigue or discouragement may hide from ordinary view.

I’m honored to have been asked to share such moments with you in the months to come.