Open the eyes of my heart

About once a month, I get together with some good friends. At each gathering we share a meal and catch up on each other's lives, then we each take a turn reading out loud from anything we've happened to read--or written ourselves--in the previous few weeks. (And I do mean anything--over the last few months the selections have ranged from song lyrics to journal entries to the first chapter of a book in progress to a cookbook to Celebration of Discipline to Everybody Poops. Yes, we have young parents in the group.)

It's a wonderful time of sharing together and a great excuse for spending an evening laughing (and sometimes crying) with friends. I highly recommend it.

We met this past weekend and I read an excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. I first encountered this award-winning book in college and it's stuck with me ever since. I read from a chapter entitled "Seeing," which talks about the experiences of men and women who had been blind from birth because of cataracts and who then received their sight due to new surgical techniques, because I found the scientific and psychological ideas so interesting. As I read this time, however, I was most struck by the spiritual analogies and my own "blindness." See what you think:

In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult....It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable....A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, "Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness."