The Beholding Life: Recognizing Our Blindness
If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves;
But when they attend to what he reveals, they are most blessed.
(Proverbs 29:18, MSG)
Last month I had a dream in which I saw my reflection in the mirror, and what I saw terrified me. My face was green and marred, my hair was dark and greasy, and my teeth and eyes were yellow. But what scared me the most was the look of malicious, evil intent in my eyes an expression that caused me to wonder, “Surely that isn’t me?”—a look that made me shudder when recalled upon waking. Because I sometimes have dark dreams that are spiritually oppressive, I dismissed this one as an attempt to unsettle me. But the kindness of God prompted me to look again. Now I wonder if what I saw wasn’t the enemy, but me—me without God. That image reminds me that though I have journeyed long with God and have been transformed by God’s love, my sinful self is still ugly. It is not my goodness that keeps me from becoming the person I saw in the mirror—it is only ever the grace of my Savior.
Father Richard Rohr writes that the true journey of transformation begins when we learn to see evil for what it is while also owning our participation with it:
The long journey of transformation leads us to ask new questions about our own goodness, and where goodness really lies; to recognize our own complicity with evil, and where evil really lies. It is humiliating.
– Richard Rohr, “Questions versus Answers”
Our sin should break our hearts, but how often do we let it? I have spent far more time and energy denying my sin than confronting it with Jesus by my side. Blinded by pride, I haven’t let my sin break my heart for a long time, but the breaking that came from my dream was a necessary gift for this self-righteous perfectionist. Tragically, confronting sin is often mishandled in Christian communities. If you’ve been around church for a while, the word “sin” has been tossed about like a volleyball, pummeling the innocent and sparing the guilty.
But when we use sin as a catch-all for everything at which we don’t like to look too closely, it becomes void of meaning. Sin is as big as holocausts and as small as a curse word spoken under the breath. We simply have no sense of scale, and that overwhelms us unto denial. With our hot-potato culture of everyone tossing blame to everyone else for fear of being exposed, we have lost our ability to ground the concept of sin within the immediate context of our daily lives. No wonder sin goes undetected—in our fixation with everyone’s behavior but our own, we have succumbed to spiritual blindness.
If we want to be able to see the kingdom of God clearly—to behold the eternal among the temporal and the invisible hidden in the visible—we must first learn to see sin clearly. We are forever blind if we cannot see sin and evil for the real threats they are. For the sake of being able to better detect the presence of sin in my own life, this is how I have come to define it: sin is any choice I make that hinders true communion with self, other, and God and keeps me from living out God’s intention for the world. Sin is everything I idolize that keeps me from seeing clearly. S
In last week’s post, I shared my intention to explore what keeps us from seeing truly, deeply, and clearly. Over the next three weeks, we will be exploring three central categories of spiritual blindness. Another way to define these three categories is “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” categories which St. Thomas Aquinas described as “implacable enemies of the soul.”
These categories often go undetected because of their familiarity:
1. Culture (the world)—the breath-stealing pace at which we are forced to live for fear of losing everything as well as the lies we are fed about our purpose, identities, and what matters most.
2. Ourselves (the flesh)—our past and present hurts, our insecurity and shame, our struggles and brokenness that trap us in sin and the false beliefs that imprison us.
3. Evil (the devil)—the powers and principalities at work in the world that want nothing more than to force our heads down and keep our gaze from beholding the Giver of all that is beautiful and true, right and holy.
In the Garden of Eden, all three of these forces were at work in the first-ever act of blindness—the genesis of evil and our complicity in it. Before looking at the moment we were blinded by our flesh and evil in a way that forever changed the world, we must remember what came first. In the very beginning, there was utter goodness, beauty, purity, and communion with God. We were Imaged into being by the same Spirit that created galaxies and giraffes, oceans and opals. “Everything I have is yours” was the promise to Adam and Eve, and God meant it—everything except for the one thing that would bring death, though to their eyes the fruit looked like life.
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
(Genesis 3:6)
The first sin was a failure of seeing. When the two image bearers saw that the fruit of the forbidden tree was pleasing to the eyes, they partook—swallowing the serpent’s lie and their first taste of death along with it. Because Adam and Eve fell for the lie and saw equality with God as something to be grasped, the world was forever changed. Their eyes were indeed opened after taking the fruit, but not to what was most true. Instead of beholding their belovedness in the mirror of God’s gaze, Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and covered their shame with fig leaves. Did the original goodness, beauty, purity, and potential for communion with God disappear in one bite? No, but their innocence was lost, and a loss of innocence opens the door to evil.
In the Garden, the devil was all too persuasive, the flesh said yes to temptation, and the world became a place of exile, struggle, and thorn—far from what God intended when God placed Adam and Eve in Eden. Does this grieve you? Does this part of the story haunt you and ring true? It should. Yet it is so easy to distance ourselves from the beginning as centuries pass and Eden reads more like a myth than the truest expression of reality this world has ever known. We are a forgetful people, and Netflix is so compelling.
It can be painful to take a long, hard look at our lives and the ways we still remain blinded to the impact of culture, sin, and evil. I confess that my eyes only want to behold the good, the beautiful, the true, and to point out what I see to others. But nothing good, beautiful, or true is visible without the bad, ugly, and false. Everything worth seeing is only apparent through contrast; light cannot exist without darkness. Therefore we must be fearless in our gaze, beholding the darkness within us and outside of us for what it is, shattering the enemy’s lies with the eyes of truth. Beholding begins with paying attention—to both the beautiful and the ugly. The one who sees clearly and truly is blessed, indeed. So have courage. Take heart! The God who loves you, beholds you, and redeems you has overcome the world. And he wants you to behold it and love it with him.
To go deeper: Listen to “Hosanna” by Hillsong—a song about beholding our Savior.
Heal my heart and make it clean;
Open up my eyes to the things unseen.
Show me how to love like you have loved me.