As Through Glasses Darkly

We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!

--1 Corinthians 13.1 (The Message)

I got new eyeglasses in the mail today. This is the first time I've worn glasses since I was about five years old, when I had a pair to correct a lazy eye. In the eye doctor's examination room, peering at the letter chart through that large optical machine, I saw the blurry black letters become sharp and crisp as the doctor flipped through lenses to come to the right prescription strength. I eagerly anticipated seeing a bright crisp new world as well. I had to wait a week or two, though, for them to be shipped. (For anyone interested, Zenni Optical sells prescription glasses from $8. I got two pairs for $31, including shipping.)

I realized that I might need glasses a few months ago, when the things I put on the projection screen in the front of my classroom looked blurry to me when I stood in the back. Just to make sure, I asked a few students sitting in the back, "Can you read that?" They answered casually: "Oh yeah." Another sign I had was that I couldn't read street signs until I came right up on them, particularly at night. Through all of my teenage years, I had "20-20" vision, and was quite proud of it then (as if I had anything to do with it). Thankfully, since then, I've gained the ounce of wisdom necessary to know that "perfect sight" is temporary, so I accepted my need for glasses gracefully. (In fact, displaying less spiritual maturity, I was even excited, since I knew they could complement my beard and tweed jacket in my "professor costume.")

When the glasses arrived  today, I put them on and could indeed see things at a distance much more clearly. Right away, I could see the leaves on trees across the lake behind our apartment. And a little later in the day when I drove to the store, I could definitely read street signs more clearly and from farther away. But . . . that was about it. The glasses did a pretty good job, but still . . . I was a bit disappointed. I was disappointed that the glasses did not make a radical difference in my ability to see the world, which, for some reason, I had been expecting. I was even more disappointed with the thought that, since these glasses were my prescription, then I would never see the world any more crisply or sharply or clearly than this.

We live in this world with physical bodies that, for many of us, mostly work most of the time, though decreasingly so day by day. Accepting and even embracing our physical limitations, even minor limitations, which are the only ones I can personally speak about yet, can be an act of spiritual grace. So too, I am coming to realize, with our spiritual limitations. As little as we see with our physical eyes of what is out there, even of what ought to be visible, we see even less with our spiritual eyes. Coming to the end of his most famous discussion on love, St. Paul connects seeing, knowing, and loving in a spiritual metaphor. We can only "see" (or "know" or "love"), he says, as one seeing "through a glass darkly." In The Message Eugene Peterson puts in "fog" and "mist" for "glass." Gregory of Nyssa echoes St. Paul in this way: "The true vision of what we seek consists precisely in this--in not seeing . . ."

The promise, of course, is that eventually we will know (or see) in full "even as we are fully known." The promise is that "it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright!" And I do long for such perfection of sight and knowledge and love. But in the meantime, it is also an act of grace to accept with humility--to embrace even--our limitations, our shortcomings, our dim and blurry vision.