Seeing the cracks in a crowd and being ready to catch them
I walked through the Arrowhead Mall in Phoenix yesterday.
A bright machine—light and sound pouring over every surface,
Each storefront shimmering as if it were the center of the world.
The air hummed, but it wasn’t alive.
People everywhere,
yet no thread between us.
Eyes locked forward.
Bodies gliding past each other without recognition.
It was like a river of sealed jars
each carrying its own little world inside —
a thousand private currents that never touched.
Then a phone dropped.
A teenage girl, arms full of shopping bags,
fumbled it.
It skittered across the tile and came to rest at my feet.
I picked it up,
and held it out.
She took it almost without looking,
already turning toward the next bright thing.
And I thought: She probably doesn’t see the crack.
That thin seam in life where recognition can slip in —
where someone might see us,
not for what we are buying,
not for what we are projecting,
but for who we are.
The mall was full of cracks like that.
A thousand human beings,
each unconsciously aching for something they could not name.
Empire teaches us to keep those cracks sealed,
because sealed jars are predictable.
We move through the aisles,
we pay at the counter,
we go home.
But Opthē isn’t a commodity, its the bag.
The vessel we carry through these landscapes of false community.
It is woven of discipline, presence, sacred coherence —
and it is lined with agapē,
that quiet, stubborn decision to act for the good of the other
whether they recognize it or not.
Our task is to walk with that bag open,
ready to catch the moment when a crack appears.
To hold and honor what the crack contains,
and plant it like a seed.
Recognition, agapē, sacred coherence —
these are not distant ideals.
They are always here
within arm’s reach,
in the next human face we meet.
The first thread of coherence is near to us now.
The only question is —
will we see and take hold of it?