I was just starting to get to know my shadow self (as my psychologist friends say) when I wrote this, at the turning of the tide of the black and white thinking that had carried me through late adolescence and lingered in a fundamentalist Christian setting. Some other friends were learning the hard way about how good intentions + do the right thing ≠ NICE LIFE. Getting personally acquainted with this formula is a lesson we all learn, or are doomed to repeat in life’s merciless remedial courses. In retrospect, this song marks the mere infancy of my relationship with that kind of higher math.
I observed that “each of us defy a reason to be loved;” that only perspective changes our focus from the damning details to the embraceable big picture. The utter lack of armor, the assailable emotional skin we reveal when we ask another to look upon us with love astounds with its honesty, and terrifies with simplicity. How much easier to spin stories and construct air-tight arguments to convince someone why they should love us?
The meaning deepens and doubles as the years go by. The challenge to “let your lens be tinted with that rose” demands me to honestly recognize shortcomings while resisting a cheaper worldly bitterness that confers a lonely superiority. On a good day, this song can strip us of our cherished litanies repeated desperately in the dark hours before dawn, and deposit us eye to eye with the actual people in our life who may or may not “deserve” our affection, but what a gift we could give?
Look upon me with love
To the naked eye each of us defy
A reason to be loved
We speak too often or too quick
Make promises we’re sure to ditch
Can’t find a reason to be loved
Please look upon me with love
Yeah, look upon me with love
Let your lens be tinted with that rose
Look upon me with love
What other question, other cry, would be so easy to deny
Than look upon me with love
There’s nothing I can guarantee
For such a risk you’d take with me
To look upon me with love
Please look upon me with love
Yeah, look upon me with love
Let your lens be tinted with that rose
Look upon me with love
There’s nothing I can guarantee
But such a gift you’d give to me
To look upon me with love
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