Seeing Is Believing

Photo of The Rev. Canon Joe Behen by The Rev. Canon Joe Behen

A number of years ago, a friend showed me a video that was basically a test of human attention.  (It's the top video at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html.)  He asked me to watch, to see how attentive I was.  In the video, three people in white shirts and three others in black shirts, were moving around randomly, and passing two basketballs around between them.  The narrator of the video said that I was to count the number of passes, made by those wearing white shirts only.  I watched closely, counting the passes as the people weaved around, trying to confuse the count.  This portion of the video ended, and I looked at my friend confidently and said, “Fifteen.”  He simply smiled, and redirected his attention back to the video.  The narrator said that the correct number was fifteen, but then threw me for a loop when he added, “But did you see the gorilla?”  What?  What was he talking about?  The video reversed and played again, and sure enough.  A person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the passers, stopped, beat his chest, and then walked away.  I couldn’t believe it.  As my friend howled with laughter, I replayed the whole video to see if they had replaced the original video.  But sure enough.  I had been so focused on one thing, that I completely missed the gorilla.[1]

This video demonstrated what its producers called “selective blindness.”  I had made the prior decision to direct my focus as I watched.  What I learned was that this focus came at a cost that I was unaware of.  It seems that much of what we see in our lives is determined by what we’re looking for in the first place.
Today’s gospel reading from John can be seen as a grand illustration of the process of selective blindness.  Notice that no sooner than the blind man is introduced to the story, the disciples pose this question to Jesus: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  In asking the question as they did, they showed that their presuppositions had already determined what they would be able to see.  But Jesus intervenes.  It is Jesus’ presence with them that broadens their range of perception.  He refuses the parameters of their question altogether, and attempts to help them to see beyond these parameters. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”  He casts aside the assumptions that drew their focus, and in doing so, enables them to see more truthfully.  John has effectively shown Jesus, to re-frame the disciples’ perception of this entire story.  Who here is it, he seems to ask, that is really blind?

John presents the Pharisees as being somewhat mixed in how they want to see Jesus.  But in the end, they are largely moved by voices that “already know,” voices that claim 20/20 vision.  It’s a dangerous place to be, since they can now learn nothing, that they don’t already know.

But things are different for the man born blind.  He claims knowledge of nothing.  “I do not know,” he says, “whether Jesus is a sinner.  One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”  While Jesus cures his sight literally, his perception grows only through a more gradual process.  Consider his responses to questions of who it was that cured him.  He first calls Jesus “a man, then a prophet, then a man come from God.  It is almost as if his vision keeps improving, so that he sees more and more clearly who has given him his sight.”  Finally, he gets the name right, as well as the response. ‘Lord, I believe.’”[2]

One of the great theologians of our time, certainly one of the most prolific, has to be Allister McGrath.  McGrath has a background in natural science, and has written about human perception from a point of view that includes current science, and uses it creatively to challenge our theology.  In his book, The Open Secret, he writes that, “… there is no such thing as objective human perception.  Perception always takes place from the point of view of the perceiver.  The world,” he says, “is represented to each of us, from the perspective of:

We are all, in a sense, blind.

In applying this concept to our passage from John, we come to see that, when our focus is inward, directed toward our own needs and concerns, our attention is claimed.  The cost of this inward focus is blindness to most of what is outside of us.  God begins to look much like ourselves, and less like others.  This attention on the self, determines what the world will look like to us.  Everything will be measured by the God who wants what we want.  We are then blind to meaning that is not of our own creation.  The difficulty is that, we are necessarily unaware, that we are unaware.

But how can we become cured of this blindness to our own blindness?  It may be that we have a clue in John’s presentation of the disciples in this story.  Their question of Jesus at the beginning exposed their limited perspective, but then, they aren’t heard from again.  The jury is still out on where they will end up in all of this.    The same is true for the man born blind.  Today, he can look deeply into Jesus’ eyes and say, “Lord, I believe.”  Tomorrow, though, that same choice will present itself yet again.  He is now a disciple.

The sight that Jesus refers to is the engaging of a process, rather than something that is once and for all arrived at.  The result of this process for the disciples is still up in the air.  This seems to be a good place for us to see ourselves.  Will I see God in the world today, and seeing God, recognize my own blindness?  Will I be able to look beyond, my answers, and parameters, and clever self-satisfaction, and see that, without God’s presence right here and now, I can see nothing.  I know nothing.

The story ends as Jesus says, “If you were blind, you would not have sin.  But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”  In other words, if I think that I see just fine, and need no help, then I am in fact quite blind.  And, I am unaware of my blindness.  But if I know that, even now, I need God’s help to see, and if I know that God is right here, ready to help me grow my vision, then I will continue to see more and more clearly. 

The two men who conducted the experiment with the invisible gorilla later wrote a book on human perception.  I saw some of the promotional material for it, in which they wrote that, “Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself.”   “…and,” they conclude, “that's a good thing.”[4]  Seeing truly is believing.

Amen.

[1] From the Invisible Gorilla website (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html ), accessed on 3/21/2011. Research by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, copywrite 1999.
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor.  Home By Another Way (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publishing, 1999) p. 76
[3] Alister E. McGrath.  The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008) p. 92
[4] From the promotional material for the book, The Invisible Gorilla (New York: Crown Publishing, 2010), accessed on 3/21/2011 at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/overview.html .