fix my eyes
Our new ophthalmologist wears red socks, that’s the first thing I notice as he leans into an apparatus that makes him look like a mechanical bug, or maybe an owl, with eyes made of magnifying glass and metallic feathers outlining the sockets, with grommets like tiny decoys scattered about his face. It can feel like visiting a magician, this thing about trying to see.
We came here because Adam’s teacher noticed him struggling to make out what she had written on the board, and because type 1 diabetics can develop eye problems as part of that chronic condition. But then, we can have trouble with our eyes for all kinds of reasons.
We can be short-sighted or unaware, prejudiced or spiritually blind. There can be a plank in our eyes that we ignore while telling other people what they need to fix, and we have all been blind guides, at one time or another. That’s what I was thinking about in the waiting room, chuckling a little as I pushed on my readers so I could see the intake papers, that the first goal of Advent is, as Tish Harrison Warren points out so well in her Advent book, taking an honest look at the fact that we live half-blind in the kind of darkness that can flat out cause you to lose sight of your hand in front of your face. This world is dark and confusing and hard, not to mention swirling with perverse motivations, and so, in so many places in scripture, salvation comes down to recovery of sight for the blind, to light illuminating darkness. If Advent has a rallying cry, it’s this, that people walking in darkness have seen a great light.
Advent begins with wanting to see.
Jesus said at the beginning of his earthly ministry, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He has anointed me…He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind.”
I can’t visit the eye doctor without thinking about Jesus, the Light, the only one who has ever been able to fix my broken view.
The ophthalmologist Adam had before, a man well known in our city for his ability to relate to people with exceptional needs, retired at the beginning of the year, and when I made this appointment, explaining to the receptionist that, as a person who also has Autism, Adam has limited expressive language, the receptionist sighed and said of our former doctor, “Yes, that was his specialty,” before putting me on hold for a while to figure out who-in-the-world should become Adam’s new doctor.
I remember thinking then, while I waited on the line, how grateful I am that Jesus, our great physician, has a well-known specialty, an affection even, for relating to those of us who have exceptional spiritual needs, who maybe don’t even know how little we can see and can’t speak very well in the heavenly tongue. I remember giving thanks right there for the always-Advent, for waiting with hope on the One who died to be my healer forever, and not only my healer, but my friend.
“Can you put your chin right here?” Our new owlish doctor asks Adam, tapping a curved metal plate with one finger without changing his position, without revealing any part of his actual face or anything, really at all, about his identity. The truth is that God would be unknowable too, vastly inconceivable to our limited minds, except that Jesus, the image of the invisible God, came and walked the earth.
Obedience comes down to trust, and Adam, who doesn’t know this doctor, glances at me, checking my face for any sign of warning, and then complies, albeit slowly. I can’t blame him. Who would want to share personal space with all those grommets?
“Of course, you can,” the eye doctor says cheerily as Adam brings his chin to rest. His tone curls up at the end, lifted by a kind of amused wonder, and I smile, recognizing that we represent as much of a mystery to our new doctor as he represents to us. He has no idea, really, what Adam can understand or what he will do, and no knowledge at all of me as an advocate.
There’s a silly creature in Douglas Adams’ iconic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who believes that, “if it can’t see you, you can’t see it.” It occurs to me, as I sit watching the absolutely awkward interaction between Adam and his new doctor, that many of us come to Christ believing, as a natural product of our lack of sight, that God’s knowledge of us is as limited as our knowledge of Him, that His heart has been as cold toward us as ours has been toward Him, that if we can’t see Him, he can’t see us either. We can’t really understand how known and loved we’ve always been by our creator until we actually begin to see.
Finally, our new doctor leans away from the owl mask and smiles, straightening a pair of bottle cap glasses I hadn’t even realized that he wore. “Well, Adam sees about a third as well as most people,” he says, patting and brushing his hands against his thighs in a that takes care of that kind of way. I can feel the finality with which he slides back toward his laptop to make his notes.
“So, Adam needs glasses,” I say, anxious to address the problems with Adam’s vision before we are dismissed. The doctor stops clicking keys and looks back.
“Well, not necessarily,” he says breezily, tilting his head. “Adam can recognize faces and see most things; glasses aren’t a must if he won’t tolerate them.”
Who said he won’t tolerate them? I’m thinking this, but what I say is, “But his teacher says he’s having difficulty seeing the board at school.” Since when is it enough to be able to see most things?
My thoughts flash to an encounter Jesus once had with a blind man whose friends brought him, begging Jesus to touch his eyes. So often, it starts this way, if not with us, with people who love us enough to want us to see and so, to bring us to Jesus. After the first touch, the Christ’s actual fingers resting on that man’s eyes, the man said he saw people, but they looked “like trees walking around.” So, Jesus touched the man’s eyes again, fully restoring his sight.
The point of the story isn’t that Jesus couldn’t have healed that man completely with just one touch, because Jesus performed other miracles without touching at all, and even healed people without being physically present in the same space. The point is that it was not enough for Jesus that the man could mostly see, and that true sight comes through a relationship with Jesus. Jesus came so that, to borrow Paul’s words, we might one day know fully, even as [we] have been fully known. Our complete clarity will find its fulfillment not in a moment or a season, but through an eternal relationship with God.
I continue with the ophthalmologist, thinking how starkly different from this transactional engagement are the steadfast love of God and His forever healing.
“I will worry about getting Adam to wear the glasses,” I say, sitting forward in my chair. “The important thing to me is that he can see, and not just most things.” I know even as I say it, that I am not simply articulating my heart for my son.
On people living in the land of darkness, the light has come.
