Newspaper Columns by The Rev. Canon Bill Lewellis
Seeing things differently, beyond our horizons
By Bill Lewellis
January, 2003, The Express-Times, Easton
I’ve experienced a miracle. Cataract surgery. A lens has been implanted in my right eye.
For years, I would not have been able to read this column with my right eye if the page were more than a few inches away. Ironically, the page would have to be a few feet away for my left eye to make it out.
Over the years, the muscles that focus our eyes seem to get stuck in a specific focal range. Both the near and the far become difficult to discern as one or the other eye winks. I now see things differently. With either eye, I see clearly. Curiously, however, perhaps because one was so long blind to the near while the other couldn’t care less about the far, they haven’t yet found a consistent way to work together.
You know, of course, I’m thinking about much more than physical sight.
We don’t care about some things that are removed from our experience. We don’t recognize other things that are close to us. We look them dead in the eye without seeing them. In both instances, something stands in the way: an idea, an ideology, a learned prejudice, perhaps a belief.
It’s a matter of perspective and perception. If we push a few words together, GODISNOWHERE, some of us will first read “God is nowhere” while others will immediately read “God is now here.” Don’t take it to heart. It’s more fun than it is significant. What may be telling is that few of us immediately see both realities.
When a Buddhist monk told his master he had an experience of nirvana, his master gave him this dismaying advice: “If you meet the Buddha along the way, kill him,.”
Though the Buddha we meet along the way may provide a clue about the really real, that Buddha will not be God. It may suggest more about us than about God, and will probably stand in the way.
Killing the Buddha is a metaphor for moving beyond our certainties and complacency, for struggling honestly, for finding a way to be religious that does not prize belief over discipleship. Every Buddha is too small. There’s nothing more dangerous than an idea, especially if it’s the only one we have.
Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about seeing things “under the cross.”
She once bought a six-inch cross of plain dark wood with a thin silver body tacked to it. She hung it in her dorm room.
After graduation it wound up in a box, carted from place to place for 30 years.
When she discovered it again, the metal loop at the top had disappeared. She could not hang it on the wall.
She set it on a clear spot on her dresser. The next day she needed space there for a stack of bills. So she put the crucifix on top of those. After she paid the bills, she needed the spot for some papers from a class she was teaching. So she put the crucifix on those. That went on and on, on one thing and on another.
At first, she thought it irreverent to keep shuffling a sacred symbol across the debris on her dresser. Shouldn’t she put it in some dedicated space where it would not rub up against unholy junk?
She says now she had unwittingly invented a “sacrament.” Hardly a day goes by that she does not handle the crucifix, deciding where to put it and noticing how it changes whatever lies beneath it.
With the cross illuminating whatever was beneath it, she began to see things differently.
We use filters to interpret both the near and far. We wear blinders to which we are blind. We have a need to see things differently, beyond our horizons.
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