Two Kinds of Blindness

Surprise! I'm back! You thought I wasn't ever going to write on this thing again, didn't you? Wait... where is everyone? LOL. I admit I have shamefully neglected this blog for a very long stretch of months, but... what can I say. Life is life. I'm just happy I was able to log back on. Almost didn't remember my password!

Having said that, I have some thoughts to share today, and they tie in to much of what I've said in previous postings. I can't promise I'll become a regular poster again, but I'm sensing another shift beginning to take place, which may mean my little fingers will be typing thoughts. I know this new shift is gonna take me toward God, but I don't yet know exactly what that's going to look like. I keep toying with the idea of going back to church. Still not quite ready yet, but I've had the opportunity in recent months to re-engage with some former friends of Fundy days who have gone through a similar transformation. I can't tell you how encouraging it is to be able to add names and faces to "the circle of trust" - people I can speak with honestly without fear of getting a sermon or an unwelcome dose of their "traditional" thoughts. I'll be able to listen to traditional thoughts again someday, but there's still some journeying to do before that. For now, it's a comfort to find fellow refugees to confide in and be transparent with.

ANYWAY... Blah, blah, blah. A thought occurred to me recently that I've rolled around in my head, intending to write on it but never actually doing so. Then it came up in a conversation I had last night with one of those fellow refugees, and I decided it was time to unpack it here. I've come to realize that there are two kinds of spiritual blindness in the world. One comes from living in the darkness. That's the obvious kind. The other kind is less obvious. It's the blindness that comes from living too close to the light. (Yes, my Fundy friends, there I go again! Haha. Apparently six months of blog inactivity haven't cured me of my horrid and heretical thoughts!) Seriously, though, give it some thought. What happens when you stare into the sun for too long? You go blind. What happens when someone turns on a light, even a faint light, in a completely dark room. Everyone squints, temporarily blinded by the brightness. The truth is, there can be just as much blindness in perfect, pure, bright light as there is in the blackest darkness.

It reminds me of something that happened in my favorite Narnia book, Voyage of the Dawn Treader. As the adventurers near the end of their journey and the eastern end of the world, the light around them becomes brighter on a daily basis, so much brighter, in fact, that the book says they have to drink the water they are sailing in, a type of liquid light, so that the light from the sun won't blind them. I've always found that to be an intriguing story element: as they journey nearer to the eastern edge of the world - the country of Aslan, who fills the role of the Christ-figure - they are in great danger of becoming blinded by the ever-increasing light. It's especially interesting because Aslan is most often written as the wild yet just yet deeply loving son of the Great King beyond the sea. You don't see a lot of him in the "bright and glorious holiness" manifestation. And that in itself is interesting, as though Lewis understood that we can't deal too much with that side of God while still entrenched in our human flesh. But I'm getting off point here: blinded by light. Ahem.

It's a fascinating concept to me, and it's one that is highly consistent with Biblical narrative. Paul was blinded by the glory of God. Moses had to be protected from the brightness of Him, unable to see but a small part of Him, and even that was almost too much. The Bible even says that God lives in "unapproachable light." Hmm. This light is generally attributed to be the physical manifestation of God's holiness, purity and glory - the part of His nature that is most foreign, and honestly most frightening, to most of us humans. If you must know, God's holiness is a facet of His nature I'd just as soon pretend isn't there. Not denying it exists. Not pretending I won't have to address it. Not saying I can truly know Him without coming to terms with that. I'm just not ready to deal with that part of Him yet, and I've told Him so. Honestly, I don't believe you can safely deal with His holiness, spiritually or emotionally, until you have a deep and personal understanding of His love and grace. Either it will scare the shit out of you or it will blind you to the point that you become a legalistic, self-righteous bastard. Probably shouldn't use those words when talking about the holiness of God, I know, but you get the point. And honestly, though the Bible certainly doesn't put it in the words I've used, I find it interesting that it acknowledges that the closer you get to the light of God's holiness, the more likely you are to be blinded by it.

There's a lot of this blindness in the church today. (You knew I was going to go there, didn't you.) It's an unintentional blindness, and ironically, it is often those who have the most light and who are, therefore, most blind, that are most blind to their own blindness. Haha. Are you confused yet? It certianly adds a whole new dimension to Jesus' teaching on the blind leading the blind, doesn't it? Those who are blinded by light trying to lead those who are blinded by darkness, and they both end up in a pit. I'm just sayin'.

My parents used to use a couple of phrases when I was growing up that resonate with this concept, though these phrases express it in different ways: "He can't see the forest for the trees" and "He's so spiritually minded, he's no earthly good." In many ways, these phrases described my sincere spirituality of more innocent days. Oddly enough, taking a few steps away from the blinding whiteness of the light has helped me to see far more clearly, even if it has cost me. Like many who are blinded by the light, I had no context with which I could even attempt to understand the issues, temptations and perspectives of people outside the church, and even, for that matter, liberal minds within the church. I had no mercy, compassion, or respect for the journey, even my own. I was missing the humble, cracked hands of a sweat-stained carpenter because I was so busy trying to pierce the brilliant veil of the Untouchable.

Now I realize that it sounds like I have no use for the holy. I know it must seem as though I'm endorsing a hedonistic embrace of the darkness, but that's not what I'm saying. Blindness in darkness is, quite possibly, even more to be dreaded than blindness in light. I'm simply saying that we, like the travelers in Lewis's Narnia, need to partake of something capable of mitigating those blinding effects, and that something is an ever deepening experience of God's love and grace. We need to recognize that so long as we move toward nothing but the light, we also move further away from those the light wants to shine on. And wasn't that the whole point of Jesus leaving His glory behind anyway - to join us in the darkness and shine that faint light that would draw us to ever greater light in the end? And that, perhaps, is my point in all this. So long as we are blinded by the light, so long as our lives are consumed in its unmitigated brightness, so long as we look on the world around us without the personal experience of love, compassion, grace and even failure, we will be useless - so heavenly minded we are no earthly good. But when tempered by these things, the light of God gets inside us, and instead of blinding us, it becomes illumination, both for us and those around us.

And by the way, this "blindness by light" I'm talking about can manifest itself in so many ways: legalism, isolationism, self-righteousness, lack of mercy, dogmatic views, disunity, a lack of teachability, and the list goes on. It's kind of scary how quickly you can lose true vision and perspective. And once again, it sounds like I don't like the light. Nothing could be further from the truth. Light is absolutely necessary. Without it, we are purposeless, lost, stuck, directionless. Without light, our destiny is too terrible to imagine. But we must understand, as we walk deeper into that light, that "the light shines in the darkness."