Blindness II

Jay: Is darkness, is blindness, beneficial to understanding who God is? Does it help our spiritual growth and our relationship with God over time? Do we need darkness? Can we know light without dark, sight without blindness? Several scriptural passages might help:

I am the Lord, I have called You in righteousness, I will also hold You by the hand and watch over You, And I will appoint You as a covenant to the people, As a light to the nations, To open blind eyes, To bring out prisoners from the dungeon And those who dwell in darkness from the prison. (Isaiah 42:6-7)

I will lay waste the mountains and hills 
And wither all their vegetation; 
I will make the rivers into coastlands 
And dry up the ponds. 
I will lead the blind by a way they do not know, 
In paths they do not know I will guide them. 
I will make darkness into light before them 
And rugged places into plains. 
These are the things I will do, 
And I will not leave them undone. (Isaiah 42:15-16)

Who is blind but My servant, 
Or so deaf as My messenger whom I send? 
Who is so blind as he that is at peace with Me, 
Or so blind as the servant of the Lord? (Isaiah 42:19)

Therefore justice is far from us, 
And righteousness does not overtake us; 
We hope for light, but behold, darkness, 
For brightness, but we walk in gloom. 
We grope along the wall like blind men, 
We grope like those who have no eyes; 
We stumble at midday as in the twilight, 
Among those who are vigorous we are like dead men. 
All of us growl like bears, 
And moan sadly like doves; 
We hope for justice, but there is none, 
For salvation, but it is far from us. 
For our transgressions are multiplied before You, 
And our sins testify against us; 
For our transgressions are with us, 
And we know our iniquities: 
Transgressing and denying the Lord, 
And turning away from our God, 
Speaking oppression and revolt, 
Conceiving in and uttering from the heart lying words. 
Justice is turned back, 
And righteousness stands far away; 
For truth has stumbled in the street, 
And uprightness cannot enter. 
Yes, truth is lacking; 
And he who turns aside from evil makes himself a prey. 
Now the Lord saw, 
And it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice. 
And He saw that there was no man, 
And was astonished that there was no one to intercede; 
Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, 
And His righteousness upheld Him. (Isaiah 59:9-16)

I will go before you and make the rough places smooth; I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars. I will give you the treasures of darkness And hidden wealth of secret places, So that you may know that it is I, The Lord, the God of Israel, who calls you by your name. (Isaiah 45:2-3)

In some passages, God seems to introduce darkness intentionally:

Listen and give heed, do not be haughty, For the Lord has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God, Before He brings darkness And before your feet stumble On the dusky mountains, And while you are hoping for light He makes it into deep darkness, And turns it into gloom. But if you will not listen to it, My soul will sob in secret for such pride; And my eyes will bitterly weep And flow down with tears, Because the flock of the Lord has been taken captive. (Jeremiah 13:15-17)

I am the man who has seen affliction Because of the rod of His wrath. He has driven me and made me walk In darkness and not in light. Surely against me He has turned His hand Repeatedly all the day. He has caused my flesh and my skin to waste away, He has broken my bones. He has besieged and encompassed me with bitterness and hardship. In dark places He has made me dwell, Like those who have long been dead. He has walled me in so that I cannot go out; He has made my chain heavy. Even when I cry out and call for help, He shuts out my prayer. He has blocked my ways with hewn stone; He has made my paths crooked. He is to me like a bear lying in wait, Like a lion in secret places. He has turned aside my ways and torn me to pieces; He has made me desolate. He bent His bow And set me as a target for the arrow. He made the arrows of His quiver
To enter into my inward parts. I have become a laughingstock to all my people, Their mocking song all the day. He has filled me with bitterness, He has made me drunk with wormwood. He has broken my teeth with gravel; He has made me cower in the dust. My soul has been rejected from peace; I have forgotten happiness. So I say, “My strength has perished, And so has my hope from the Lord.” (Lamentations 3:1-18)

Perhaps the greatest story of God’s blinding someone in order to establish a relationship is that of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus:

Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” And he said, “Who are You, Lord?” And He said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do.” The men who traveled with him stood speechless, hearing the voice but seeing no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; and leading him by the hand, they brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank. (Acts 9:1-9)

Don: It seems that there is value in certain kinds of light and certain kinds of darkness. Adam and Eve had a certain blindness—parts of the spectrum were invisible to them until the Fall.

Donald: Today we classify blindness as a visual disorder. Other relevant modern terminology includes sighted, visually challenged, legally blind, eye correction, low vision, vision loss, partial sight, and visual acuity. It’s very clear in the Bible, as we read these passages, that “blind” was the way to describe someone’s inability to see, whether that was total or partial blindness. Just think what this world would be like without glasses. Are we blind? Is it a light issue? Is it a sharpness issue?

I am more comfortable with the word “darkness,” in which we become more vulnerable and more likely to reach out for strength. So in some ways being in darkness puts us in a position of being less confident; feeling the need, and not really being able to ponder the future.

Jay: To rephrase that as a question, I would say: “Is someone who has clarity of sight capable of being led?”

Donald: They would not feel the need to be led, because they can see. They would be helping others with less clarity of sight. Why am I going to church in a few minutes? Is it because I feel more vulnerable, that I have needs, that I need to have someone show me the way?

David: “The sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.” (Dao De Jing, ch. 12). The ancient Daoist-leaning sceptic Zhuangzi gave the example of a butcher who, when first learning his craft, saw an ox as an ox. After much practice, he saw an ox as cuts of meat. After achieving mastery, he didn’t see anything—he was able to butcher the animal without looking and with a precision so perfect that his knife would last a lifetime without needing to be sharpened. The butcher was blind when he first saw an ox, but he could see perfectly when he no longer needed to look at it. The point is that things are upside down. We who are not sages—who have not reached the equivalent level of the butcher in mastery of spiritual oxen—are unable to distinguish good from bad, right from wrong, beauty from ugliness. The sage knows that all things are equal; that is to say, they are One. Therefore, no-one can judge between them. When we accept that, we can be guided, like the butcher, by what we feel rather than by what we see.

Kiran: Traditionally we think of dark as bad and light as good, but both may be either! When I am in darkness, I may be scared of dangers lurking in the darkness—I feel vulnerable. But the darkness also enables me to do things I cannot do in bright light. Some of those things I may not be proud of, but others—such as admitting my vulnerability and reaching out for help—are good. So too with light. It is no good if I am unable to see the presence of Jesus reflected in it:

“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.” (John 3:19-21)

I believe that when Jesus shines his light he shines it on our innermost being, and gives us the terrifying opportunity to see inside ourselves. At the same time, it also gives me the opportunity to see others in spiritual need and lead them to the light. But the bad part of light is that it seems to enable me to judge others, because I can see them.

Anonymous: When God shines his light on you, you see inside yourself. But surely it does not shine on others who are in darkness—if they are in darkness, it means logically that there is no light shining on them.

Don: We are to walk by faith and not by sight. The blind leading the blind places all in danger of falling into the ditch. But the inner light does provide a form of spiritual navigation. Yet there are apparently things which we are supposed to be spiritually blind to. What are they?

David: Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were blind to sin. That implies that sin existed in the Garden, but it did not matter as long as they could not discern it. God seems to want sin to be irrelevant to us, but if it is, then so must Goodness be also! As the Dao teaches, Good and Evil are One, a unity. It is this Oneness that we are incapable of fathoming but are capable of sensing, of seeing it only through a glass darkly, at least until we die. We are never going to understand this on an intellectual level. We can sense its meaning through feeling, but we can never see it sharply delineated.

Jay: Are you saying that before the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in darkness, and after the Fall, in light?

David: I am saying that before, they lived in an environment where Good and Evil coexisted but were unable to distinguish between them. So they might well have been doing both good and evil without knowing it, and it seems that as far as God was concerned, that was just the way he wanted it. He wanted Oneness. In that sense, Adam and Eve were unenlightened—they were endarkened—in terms of their knowledge of Good and Evil, until they ate the apple, when the situation was reversed.

Were they blind? As Donald noted, the term can mean many things. People born totally blind at birth demonstrably develop many other ways of navigating through life. Their remaining intact senses become hyper-sensitive, enabling them to “see” without eyes. Adam and Eve must have been able to navigate the Garden spiritually without the equivalent of eyes.

Anonymous: Before the Fall, they lived by faith, not by sight. After the Fall, they lived by sight, not by faith.

Jay: Faith and darkness sound like odd bedfellows, yet both seem to be critical components of our spiritual journey. Without both, it seems we cannot complete as much of the journey as we might.

Don: It does seem that God wants to limit our sight in some way. Such was clearly the case before the Fall. There seems to be something that needs to be obscured. Mankind’s sinful condition prompts him to want to see more. It makes us less vulnerable, less dependent, less needy, and serves our in-born natural inclination to want to be self-sufficient. It seems that a certain amount of darkness, and not total light, is necessary for spiritual health.

Donald: Is the difference between navigating and seeing a question of the amount of light, or clarity and perspective? A photographer’s responsibility is to ensure that a person who is looking at an image is clear as to what its priorities are. So the photographer provides focus or lack of focus to establish visual priorities and remove confusion in an unorganized world. So it’s not a matter of light or dark, but of clarity. Every time we encounter something, we try to organize it so we can understand it; otherwise, it is confusing. It does not mean we are blind. It means we prioritize what we are confronted with, and sometimes we let others help us decide what the priorities should be.

David: To me, that implies the application of intellect to guide us, and that is the very thing (it seems to me) we are told not to apply to the understanding of spiritual matters. The intellect is necessary for guiding us through material life on earth but is the wrong place to turn for spiritual guidance. Worldly insight can be gained from intellectual clarity (and photography lends itself very well to this) but spiritual insight into the nature of our relationship, our Oneness, with God, cannot. Spiritual insight cannot be seen, it can only be felt.

Kiran: Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were limited in what they could see, and therefore had “blind” trust in God. But after the fall, their sight was no longer limited so they felt they could decide for themselves what to do and lost their reliance on God. So intellectual activity that leads to greater self-reliance is bad, but if it can lead us to become like children—intellectually dumber!, then it is good.

Robin: To be spiritually intelligent is the opposite of being intellectually intelligent. To me, it means being sensitive to the holy spirit, and not seeking intelligence from within one’s self.

Jay: In other words, it’s the difference between seeking discernment through one’s own intellect or through a spiritual source. If spiritual discernment lacks the clarity of intellectual discernment, does it mean that there are shades—levels—of darkness?

Kiran: Scripture talks of “deep darkness” and “outer darkness”, so evidently there are different gradations.

Don: Why do we seek spiritual vision and enlightenment, such as through these meetings of ours? Why is it to our advantage? It seems unlikely that people would meet to seek spiritual darkness; yet a certain kind of opacity seems essential to a healthy spiritual life. Our desire to open the eyes and to be discriminating and to be able to see everything clearly is a part of the human condition. Perhaps, like Donald’s photographer, God wants some things left out of focus so that we focus on the right things.

Donald: In our spiritual journey we seek to bring clarity to what we don’t know, but we want to be vulnerable, we want to see God. We’ve discussed the issue of Truth to the extent that it is now very sharp and clear. Without that, we would be spiritually less advanced. There is some value in being vulnerable. Where there’s a great deal of darkness in our lives, we want to see God all the more, but we don’t like the darkness. We want to turn on a light so that we can see and sort things out.

Don: The human desire to turn on the light so we can discriminate what’s out there seems to be missing the mark. Perhaps the spiritual journey ought not to seek a clearer picture of God but a clearer sense on a more abstract level of who God is.

Jay: We think of our spiritual journey as something that will lead eventually to complete understanding of the Truth, of God, and of his will. But what if the goal of our spiritual journey necessarily entails some ambiguity? God could surely give us clarity if he wanted. But there is a haziness in our relationship with God, that we seek to remove—that we set as the goal of our spiritual journey. But should something else be our real goal, and is the haziness vital to the achievement of the real goal?

Don: I think the argument is that haziness, that blindness, is essential in forcing us to reach out and be led by God and his spirit. When we claim to see clearly and unambiguously we may be straying into dangerous ground. It doesn’t dilute the spiritual journey, but it may need us to accept some level of discomfort along the way.

David: I am not sure that we assemble as we do every week purely as an intellectual exercise to get to the bottom (so to speak!) of God. I think our meetings have more to do with the notion of Oneness. I think we all know in our hearts that we can never get to the bottom of all this, and that is a more or less tacit realization, and confession to one another and to God, of our blindness. The sharing of these feelings, the constant confession of our blindness, is humbling, and it seems to me such is the nature of our spiritual journey. If there is a bottom to God, we may only ever reach it in the next life’s journey, not in this one.

Don: It does lead to humility and a sense of the need for God’s grace.

Anonymous: We spend our spiritual journey accumulating knowledge. We spend our material journey accumulating material things. When we die, we can take neither our accumulated wealth nor our accumulated knowledge with us. When we face God, we must do so without a shirt to our backs and without an ego. We must give up everything. The only way of facing God in the end is to be as naked physically and intellectually as we were on the day we were born.

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Zhuang Zhou (Zhuangzi) c. 369-286 BC