To See Clearly

Keith Miller’s book, A Second Touch, was based on the story found in the Gospel of Mark (8:22ff) of Jesus healing of a blind man in Bethsaida.  The people brought the man to Jesus and begged him to touch him.  Jesus led the man by the hand away from the village.  He spat on his eyes and laid his hands upon him and asked whether he could see anything.  The man’s sight began to come back and he said, “I see men; they look like trees, but they are walking about.”  Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again.  The man once blind was cured with a second touch.  Now “he saw everything clearly.”

There are many people who have been touched once by Jesus who say with boldness that they are able to see everything clearly ever since that first touch.  It has never been so in my own journey.  How many times have I looked hard, but could only “see men; they look like trees, but they are walking about.” The blind man’s healing experience reminds me of my own before I put on my first pair of glasses, when  I would look at the teacher’s writing on the chalkboard and the letters seemed to dance around.    I’m one of those characters of whom Jesus mentioned often:  “Do you still not understand?  Are your minds closed?  You have eyes: can you not see?  You have ears: can you not hear?”  The prophet Jeremiah said the same:  “You foolish and senseless people, who have eyes and see nothing, ears and hear nothing” (5:21).  Even the Psalmist mentioned characters like me, characters who need their blindness healed over and over again, “They have mouths that cannot speak and eyes that cannot see; they have ears that do not hear….”

John Ruskin wrote about this business of seeing clearly. “The greatest thing the human soul ever does in this world is see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.  Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”  Douglas Steere wrote:  “To see clearly is poetry and prophecy and religion in one.”

Do we see clearly? How do we see Men?  Women?  Neighbors? Friends? Immigrants? Do they look like trees walking about?  How many “second touches” will it take before I can see clearly?