This Sunday, many churches will read a long passage on Jesus curing a blind man from John 9. It has set me to thinking about sight. When I was young, like many people, I read Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. If you truly grasped something, the science fiction word for it was to grok. When I express I understanding, I use a visual term, oh I see it. I may say that I don’t see your point. My ineptitude with things mechanical stems from my inability to “see” how things work and are put together.
Do we see things as they are? When I was young, John Birch Society lunacy was properly laughed off as conspiracy viewpoints of folks untethered to reality. Now such viewpoints are said openly in public, sometimes by seemingly sane people. People freely post and reposting ravings, and then get upset if they are called on their being the product of fantasy.
As Anais Nin said, we do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.” We project attitudes on to people and events all of the time. I suppose introverts look at things differently than extroverts, at least at times. We definitely know that pessimists view the world with a different set of lenses than optimists.Objectivity is often more of an aspiration than a reality when we are dealing with human behavior.
We cannot or will not face certain things. Ideology is an interpretive screen, but it can scrren out the unfamiliar or unacceptable to the cause. Religious people screen out part of the bible that they find uncomfortable from any perspective. Of course, so called creationists apply their particular view of only Gen. 1 to screen out scientific facts. they then have the unmitigated gall to declare outmoded thought patterns, inaccuracies, and ill-understood points to be on par with the vast array of scientific studies, as in the call for “equal time” for the new series, Cosmos.Partisanship blinds us to the good points of politicians of the other party and blinds us to the foibles of those in our own. Perhaps, it is most clear in matters concerning climate change. People disregard a scientific consensus because thye find the truth more than inconvenient, but unpalatable.
We see things that are not there.We are fully capable of ocnjuring up what we wish to see even when we can find no evidence ot support us.As the Temptations taught us, “it is just my imagination, running away with me.” We claim our own misinterpretations as the truth.
In Pilgrim’s Progress one of the early stages involves visiting the house of the Interpreter. Sacred religious texts require interpretation. In my literary interests in regard to the bible, we can say that we interpret through three screens: the historical background of the passages, the world that the words created within the text itself, and the perspective we bring to the passage when reading it now. No one interprets the Bible literally. Everyone emphasizes or downplays elements within it.
John Calvin famously called Scripture to be spectacles, our instrument for seeing God and the truths about ourselves.
Love is blind, we have heard. Lord Byron reminded us that after a period of infatuation, especially when love goes wrong, our sight becomes positively microscopic in detailing faults that were seen as charming or were unnoticed just days before.In the end, Christians are exposed to a story that tells us that god indeed loves us blindly. We are to see the Christ, the author of blind love, within each person we encounter. Perhaps most difficult, that includes oneself. Perhaps, we see clearly only through the eyes of love.
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