Diary of a Theologian

Sight Limits

“I love the fog,” a friend was saying on a recent morning. He said it reminds us of how little we can really see—until God lifts us up to himself.
    Some researchers are now saying that our non-visual senses (touch, smell, hearing, tasting) have withered on account of the prevalence of artificial light. If you were a retailer of meat or vegetables in a city, say, 200 years ago, you would be at a wholesale market every day long before dawn, obtaining your goods to sell later that day. There was no artificial light to help you (candles would have been far to expensive, and not a lot of good anyway). You would touch and smell the goods on offer and be able, through those other senses, to pick out which products were the best quality.
    We are almost never in the dark anymore, so we don’t know how to use the non-visual senses.
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    The Bible carries on an extended polemic against trusting in our sight. Vision is what leads people to turn away from God to the idols. So it starts in Genesis: God creates light on the first day, but he doesn’t create sun and moon until the fourth day. And even then, the text refrains from calling them by those names, “sun” and “moon,” perhaps on account of the pagans worshiping sun and moon as gods. Rather, Genesis demotes them further, not only down to the fourth day, but also calling them merely “the greater light” and “the lesser light.” The message for the careful reader is clear: these “lights” are not divine and are not the most trustworthy things.
    When Samuel is looking over the sons of Jesse, trying to discern which one God wants to be king, Samuel is impressed by their looks. But God tells him that he, God, does not see as man sees; he does not look on the outward appearance, but on what is interior.
    So—clinching the point, in my view—when God reveals himself to the latter prophets, he does so by his Word. “The Word of the Lord came to me,” a prophet may say: it is a word that comes, and thus precisely something that must be listened to.
    Of course, there are visions, such as the famous one of Isaiah 6 from which we get the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy”). God still uses vision to reach us. And we are promised that, someday, the blessed will see him face to face. May we be in their number! And in the meantime, may we learn the lesson of the fog.
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    Out & about. “Strange but True Things about God” is my current class at Incarnation, 3966 McKinney, Dallas. This week’s topic is freedom, namely, how God causes our free actions without thereby making them any less free. The class meets at 10:20 a.m. on Sundays in the education building, room 119, through February 5. 
    You may listen to last week’s class here.
    On Tuesday, January 24, I will be speaking at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Buffalo, N.Y., on Losing Susan. The event begins at 7 p.m. More info here. 

    And speaking of Losing Susan, the paperback edition is to be released next month.

Privacy

            I would not have seen him if he had not called out my name.

            I was in the Denver airport, checking out the area around my gate; he was on a moving sidewalk going the opposite direction. “Victor!” I heard, and hearing my name, I turned around. It was Father Matthew Olver, waving an arm at me as he went past. We met at the end of the sidewalk and enjoyed the surprise of the unexpected intersection of our respective journeys. But if he had called out anything else except my name, I would not have heard his voice, not there amidst the clamor of hundreds of voices of people moving in thousands of directions.

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            We tend to think that our sensations are things we share with other people but that our thoughts are interior and private. Actually it is the other way around. It is our sensations that belong to each of us individually and are private, in the sense of unshareable. Herbert McCabe gives this example. I cannot know what you taste when you drink a pint of Guinness. But when you say “a pint of Guinness” I know exactly what you mean.

            Thoughts, ideas, stories, convictions—these are the things we can share. And there’s the paradox: the most personal things about us are the most shareable things.

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            Who we really are comes out when we hear someone call our name. This happens in friendship. She was in the garden, tears on her face, bereft that not only had her dearest friend died, but his body had been removed and seemed lost. A man she took to be a gardener asked her why she was weeping; she replied that her friend’s body had been taken from the tomb, and that she knew not where it had been laid. He then said her name. At once she recognized him.

            This is of course the story of Mary Magdalene seeing the risen Jesus for the first time (John 20). It shows the remarkable power of our name. When the good shepherd says our name, everything in our heart is brought into the open, and tears are turned into joy.

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            In a world of crime and persons with evil intent, we all rightly guard our privacy: even true things about us can be put to bad use by those who would wish us harm. But in the kingdom of heaven, it seems to me, there is no privacy. There is individuality, each person a unique locus of glory.

            There is, we see, nothing private about God. Each Person of the Trinity just is his relationship to the other two. Everything interior is brought forth and offered in love.

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            Out & About. January 15, I will start a four-Sunday series, “Strange but True Things about God.” We’ll cover basic questions of creation, freedom, evil, and prayer. The classes are at 10:20 a.m. in Room 119 of the education building of Incarnation, 3966 McKinney.