Psalm 73 - How a Lego Alien Facehugger Speaks to Psalm 73 (or Seeing What We See)

In my book, Ordinary Benchmarks, when sharing about the parallels between focus in photography and focus in spirituality, I wrote of how we find what we focus upon. For the entry on March 1, I wrote,

In Matthew 7:7-8 (NRSV), Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” This is often interpreted as a message about prayer but maybe it can also be something around this idea. If we search for the cross, we will find it as it is in the sky and the reflection in this photo. If we look for beauty, we will see beauty. If we look for gratitude, we will find gratitude. By the same token, if we are looking for things that make us mad, we will find things that make us mad. The more intentional we are about looking for something, the more we will see it.

I am grateful for the ways in which this is also reflected in the ways others see the world such as Instagram user dicken_tututu .

dicken_tututu shared a post a month or so ago about how he saw something rather unique in this Lego “Cute Bunny 3-in-1” set.

This same set is a 3-in-1 and can also be made into a cute seal or a cute llama. Anyway, he didn’t see any of those. Instead he saw the facehugger from the scifi/horror Alien series of movies (Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien: Resurrection, Alien: Romulus, etc). Here’s his post about it. My son sent the post to me a few weeks ago and I’ve had my eye on building it since.

I love the fact that dicken_tututu somehow saw how the pieces of the cute bunny set could be used to build something that is, shall we say, rather different... While I LOVE some of the Alien movies (emphasis on some since several are terrible), there’s nothing cute and sweet about the facehugger. (If you are unfamiliar with it, I’ll leave it to you to find videos on youtube. Searcher beware...). But still...I have a soft spot in my geeky heart for the creature, especially to be able to build it in Lego. So my amazing wife gave me the Cute Bunny set as an Easter present and it was transformed into the facehugger (who I named Charlie) on Friday. Here’s a timelapse video of the build I created so that my kids could join in the fun followed by a photo of Charlie. (Music is the facehugger theme composed by Jerry Goldsmith from the original Alien movie).

At this point, you may be wondering about anything deeper or more meaningful than this. Fair point. I could just leave it at this point because the lesson (as odd as it is) is there in the fact that @dicken_tututu was looking for how to build this thing somehow in Lego and he saw it in the Cute Bunny set. What we are looking for (gratitude, joy, hope, even anger or upset, or a scifi alien creature), we will see it. But let’s go a bit further.

Psalm 73, at least at first, might seem like an unlikely place to find a similar connection. Last time I checked, there were no sci-fi aliens in the Bible, nor anyone named Charlie. Psalm 73 starts out in a pretty familiar way, at least as the Psalms go. It is a contrast between the way of the righteous and the way of the “heedless” (as Norman Fischer’s Opening To You translation calls “the wicked”). But it laments how the heedless are often still praised and celebrated by the peoples while those who live the righteous life don’t often experience the “rewards.” It eventually shifts further into a song giving thanks for God’s abiding presence in the midst of this contrast. But then come verses 23-25

Now
I know
I am continually
With you
You have taken
My right hand
And led me quiet
Into your house
Guided me
With daily
Awareness fo you
And when my life ends
You will take me again
Into the limitless fire
That has always burned in me ¹

I put in bold the lines that connected all of this for me. Guided me with daily awareness to you. On the one hand, we can just put the responsibility on that onto God, Jesus, or something or someone external to us and act like we don’t have any role in it. Or we can make that an intentional choice and have a daily awareness. We can make the intentional choice to try to see the things of God in life around us. We can seek to find joy, hope, or gratitude. We can also make the choice to be intentional to see the realities of life of others whose lives are very different from our own. We can open ourselves up (thank you Norman Fischer for your title) to all of this rather than having a narrow and limited perspective. And, unlike a camera, we have the ability to have a focus on more than one thing at a time. We can be intentionally opening ourselves up to a wide variety of things, including finding an alien facehugger in a cute lego bunny set.

But it doesn’t have to be opening to everything, everywhere, all at once. Sometimes we have to limit what we open ourselves to. For example, I make intentional choices to how much I open myself up to the news of the world around me beacuse I know that if I open up to too much, I’m going to get swallowed up by it (hence why I have a daily time limit set for news websites). It is also why I’ve largely left most social media sites because I got tired of being force-fed what the algorithms thought would keep me hooked.

It is also why my camera is nearly always with me when I’m out. It is because I want to be intentional for looking for the holy, the beautiful, and the unique around me. And for me, that is best experienced through the lens of my camera. That will undoubtedly be different for others.

So to come back to Charlie the Lego Alien Facehugger. Charlie has joined the other geeky items on what our family has termed “the geek shelves” in our basement. He has a happy home there. But I am grateful that he is also a reminder of this truth of our intentional open awareness.

What are you intentional about seeing and experiencing in the world?

Here’s a few other photos (a bit more in the norm of what I share) from Scout and my walk at Rowe Woods on Saturday morning. Part of my intention that morning was to look for water droplets after a rainy day on Friday. Here is my favorite of the water droplets followed by a few other unique moments, including one that was a total accidental photo but I still think is really beautiful.

Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed

PS - Scout on the trail while we were walking.

1. Fischer, Norman. Opening To You: A Zen-Inspired Translation of the Psalms, p 94.