On Sight and Insight

I write the day of the miraculous eye surgery practice by Dr. Hanish. That has led me to consider the metaphor of sight in different areas of life.In particular, we are a long way from having the miracle of cataract surgery being applied to our lack of insight into situations, relationships, and the dark, screened-off parts of our own personalities.

Recently, I received an invitation for out 40th high school reunion next year (gasp). Much of what we do at a reunion is based on perspective. With the lower angels of our nature, we may hope that the cheerleader or homecoming queen has not aged well, and the better angels of our nature hope for good things for those lower on the awful social scale. Our reactions to changes are interesting. While we accept the changes in ourselves as perfectly proper and natural, we resent the changes in others. Why? I think it violates the playback button of our memory. We want to see people as we remember them, even if we rationally know that cannot be. It almost feels like a personal affront that someone would dare to change from how we recall them in our mind’s eye.

I’ve been reading a new set of essays, The Idea of America, by the eminent historian Gordon Wood. He reminds us that one of the great aspirations of the founding Era was that public service should be disinterested (not as the word has morphed into being uninterested), but objective, public spirited, having a horizon broader than one’s self interest. In our time, we have given up on even te ga of objectivity. While admitting that bias creeps into all of our judgments, is it not still a worthy aspiration” Notice the quality of our national leaders when we had adopted a standard of disinterested public service compared to the lesser aspirants for office with whom we contend in our day.

In an oddly similar way, we may well need the help of a neutral, disinterested party when we examine our relationships. they are too close for us to see well, as jut as it is said that a doctor shouldn’t treat family members, nor a lawyer take on family as a client.One of the great aids of therapy is to have a neutral person who is on the side of the relationship, not either party, help us to see past our point of view, past our bias, and see more clearly into the relationship itself and our roles in it. The therapist takes on the role of a skilled friend who can listen with a third ear, or perhaps see with the third eye where our own vision is distorted.

In spiritual life, consider John Calvin’s metaphor of the Bible being spectacles, glasses. In other words, he thought that we did see but “in a mirror dimly.” Scripture gives focus to how we view the world. Maybe in our time we could switch it slightly to X-ray vision. through Scripture we ca glimpse the world behind the curtain. Put differently, it helps us perceive the hand of God in the world, where we would be blind to it. I have always been taken with the phrase, “the biblically-tutored imagination.” Soaked in Scripture, our imaginations can use images in provocative and deeper ways toward insights. It helps us to peer into that most protected of fortresses, our inner being. In Scripture, the Spirit guides us to make discoveries and to even discover ourselves in its pages. When Jesus healed the blind, it is almost always a signal about some spiritual blindness being touched as well. Perhaps that it the greatest journey that lies before us, to see into the depths of the human self, clearly.