Light and Seeing

In the second chapter of ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’, Annie Dillard talks about seeing. She marvels at the beautiful things that we can see as human beings, from distant galaxies in the night sky, to a tiny amoeba kept in a bottle. She talks about being grateful for the special things that we are able to glimpse for no more than a few seconds, nature’s version of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’. She then carries the reader and puts him in the shoes of those who have been unfortunate enough to have been born blind.

In one of the books she read, the author collected accounts of those who have been born blind due to cataracts, yet were able to have their sight restored when Western surgeons discovered how to remove them. We assume that the patients must have been so grateful for this gift of sight. We imagine what they must have missed all their lives. We would think that when they opened their eyes for the first time, they would have been in awe of what they saw. This couldn’t have been further from the truth. As a matter of fact, most of them couldn’t make out what this new sensation was. They would just be blinded by all the light entering their eyes. They couldn’t understand what they were seeing. To them, everything was all just patches of color. They had no concepts of space and distance. One of the patients couldn’t understand why some parts of certain objects were darker than other parts. He had to be taught that objects cast shadows. They had no notion that objects look larger when they are closer. They did not realize that they can actually ‘bump’ into one of the objects in their vision. On the other hand, some of them actually tried to grasp the Moon. They couldn’t find any meaning in what they saw. Many of them reverted back to their old ways of sensing, by using their hands and tongues to distinguish between objects.

We are so used to seeing objects and interpreting them into 3-dimensional space that we have forgotten that what we actually see is not the real world but just a tiny spectrum of electromagnetic waves that have been reflected into our eyes! We cannot remember how it was like when we first opened our eyes as little babies and saw the world for the first time. The patches of color must have been meaningless to us at first, just like the cataract patients who had their sight restored. We then slowly learned to find meaning in them. We learned how to distinguish between various objects, and then found out about space and shadow.

I wonder if it is the same with the spiritual side of seeing. For those of us who have never sensed God, we cannot find meaning in our first encounters with Him. The apostle John loved to use the metaphors of light and darkness to symbolize God and non-God. He wrote: The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. We wonder what all the spiritual patches of color that we call ‘experiences’ mean. We wonder why some of our experiences have shades that are darker than others. We slowly begin to find meaning in these experiences, and begin to see that there are objects closer to us that we can grasp, things that we can understand. However, we also realize that a large portion of the things we see are objects so distant that we cannot reach them, just like the mysteries that surround God and His nature.