Shadows In The Rain

In certain cultures, blindness is considered a spiritual gift.  It is believed that when one cannot see the physical world, the attention shifts to the spiritual world, to the unseen.  So spiritual insight is gained at the cost of physical sight, but that gift is so great, so valuable, and so precious that it far outweighs the curse.  It is only when one cannot see that one truly begins to see.

I have lost 60% of my hearing.  Ten years ago, it was 40%.  Ten years before that, 20%.  A decade previously, well, I could hear just as well as anyone.  But, at this rate, I am losing about 2% of my hearing per year.  And, honestly, I don’t mind.  Because, as strange as it may seem, the more of my hearing that I lose, the better I listen.  I don’t read lips, of course, but I use my eyes to gauge visual clues.  For all our talent and all our technology, we still speak one word at a time.  This is not so with sight.

We hear sequentially, but we see simultaneously.

The five senses work so well together that when one is lost, the others compensate.  For instance, blind people can have a heightened sense of smell.  Deaf people can have a greater visual acuity–Sign is a completely visual language, after all–and they can also have a heightened sense of touch.  I am not Deaf; I am hard-of-hearing, but I remember when Star Wars was re-released on the twentieth anniversary.  I could feel Darth Vader breathing.  And not just in the soft cushions of my seat; I could feel Vader inhale and exhale in the hard cement beneath my feet.  With my shoes and socks on.  It sent chills down my spine.

There are also…other advantages.

For instance, several years ago I went to see a friend of mine who was married.  He was in his backyard spreading stones beneath his porch to alleviate the floodwaters that would accumulate in his backyard every time it rained.  I remember him working harder than necessary for such a hot day.  And when his wife, who was bipolar, asked what he wanted from the grocery store he snapped at her.  After she left, he and I talked.  But soon he started complaining about the stones and the floodwaters.  Even the men who had brought the stones and dumped them in the wrong place.  He hated his father-in-law, too.  And his brother.  Probably, I wasn’t too far behind.

So I said, “How’s your marriage?”

And he snapped, “What the hell has that got to do with anything?”

“Just asking.  How are things going between you two…intimately?”

“She just needs to take the list with her or she’ll buy things we can’t afford or forget something.  The doctor screwed up her meds and it’s going to take her a while to adjust.”

“Is that all?”

“What the @#$% are you asking me this for?”

“Just wondering.”

The next thing I knew, he took the shovel and swung it like a baseball bat against the concrete foundation of the house.  ”We made love last night.  I thought it was great, but afterwards she started bawling her eyes out like somebody died.  Try making love to your wife and then watching her bawl her eyes out afterwards!”

Needless to say, the rest of the afternoon made for quite a conversation.

He had never before talked about the intimate details of his marriage.  And I honestly don’t know how I knew something was off.  I just…knew.

I listened–to the pace and tone of his speech, his vocal inflections, word choice, and how he chose to use those words and when.  There were also avoidance tactics like no eye contact, changing the subject, and deflecting his anger by discussing insignificant and irrelevant matters.  And long before he swung that shovel, his body language gave away his stress with his tense shoulders, not to mention that he was working harder than necessary.

That is just one example from ten years ago; there are many more I could mention, though it would obviously be unwise of me to do so.  But Carl Jung called this sixth sense intuition.  In most cases, it defies logic.  But the insights are often true, though it takes years to develop the talent.  And besides, what we say can never adequately convey what we mean.

A contradiction?  Sure.

But in matters of humanity, what isn’t?

It is very easy to condemn a crack addict as a thief, a felon, and a loser you would never associate with.  But that man was still made in God’s Image.  To say that he wasn’t made in God’s Image is to say that God made a mistake.  Well, God doesn’t make mistakes.  So to condemn a drug addict with judgmental eyes is to commit the sin of idolatry–which, by the way, is the first command in The Mosiac Law:  ”You shall have no other gods before me.”

Besides, if you look long enough, you just might discover that that crack addict was sexually abused as a child.  Or that the alcoholic you make it a point to avoid lost his mother when he was just ten years old and that he spent the next seven years of his life going through twenty-five different foster homes.  Sometimes, the pain is so great that the only escape one can find is in drugs and alcohol.  Is it any wonder Christ taught His followers not to judge?

After years of being so judgmental and so arrogant, silence has taught me to listen.

“…was blind, but now I see.”

Because, I know that somewhere behind that crack addict…and somewhere beneath all that drinking…is The Image of The Almighty God, to whom I shall one day give an account.

Can you see the artistic masterpiece of God’s Image through the graffiti of a fallen world?

Can you see the shadows in the rain?