The Opening of the Eyes

Stage Two — Perception: How should one see?

My friend,

You have laid stones for a while now. The habits of conduct and integrity you have been practicing are a path under your feet, and it is precisely because you can walk steadily that we can afford to lift our eyes from the ground.

That is the movement of this stage, and the order matters. A person whose life is chaotic cannot see clearly — the noise of their own disorder drowns everything else out. Foundations first, then vision. It could not have gone the other way around.

I want to begin with a prayer, and I want you to carry it for the whole of this stage:

Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law.

Psalm 119:18

Sit with what is being asked there.

The traveler does not ask for a map. He does not ask for instructions he can master by his own cleverness. He asks for something to be done to him — for his eyes to be opened, as if they were, at present, closed.

That is a humiliating request and it took me years to make it honestly. I could pray for guidance easily enough. Praying to be shown what I could not currently see meant admitting I was walking about in a fog of my own manufacture, entirely convinced it was daylight.

Surface Literalism

The characteristic blindness of this stage has a name, and once you know it you will find it everywhere, starting with yourself.

Surface literalism is the habit of seeing only the outward shell of a thing.

It sees a neighbor and registers an obstacle to the schedule. It sees a commandment and registers a dry rule. It sees a difficult conversation and registers an inconvenience to be got through. It is not wickedness. It is a kind of flatness — the perception of a person moving quickly through a world they have stopped actually looking at.

I lived like this for a long time and I would not have described myself as blind. I would have described myself as busy, which is the same condition with better public relations.

To see truly is to look past the surface to the depth that breathes underneath it. Not to invent a depth that isn't there — this is not fancy — but to notice the one that is.

Barnabas, and My Confusion

For a guide here we turn to the Epistle of Barnabas, and I will be honest about how badly I received him at first.

Barnabas takes the ancient command to build a physical Temple — the literal center of the old covenant's worship — and says that trusting in a building made by human hands was a tragic misunderstanding. The true temple, he says, is not stone. It is the human heart. When we are forgiven and renewed, God takes up residence in us.

I thought this was an evasion. It looked to me like a man dodging the plain sense of Scripture because he found it inconvenient.

It took me a long while to see that Barnabas was reading the Bible exactly as the apostles read it. The letter to the Hebrews says it outright: the law has a shadow of the good to come, not the very image of the things (Hebrews 10:1).

A shadow. Which means: if you are looking at a shadow, there is something casting it, and the whole point of the shadow is to make you turn around and look for the substance.

The physical sanctuary was not the point. It was a material picture, placed in the world to teach a spiritual fact — that the Creator of everything intends to make a permanent dwelling inside a human person.

Now I must stop and say something, because I have used Barnabas and I do not want to have used him dishonestly.

The letter goes places I will not follow. Its author does not merely read the old covenant's commands as pointing forward; in places he argues that Israel never rightly held the covenant at all — that the people misunderstood their own law from the beginning, and that it was always and only meant as the thing we now take it for. That is a further step, and it is a bitter one, and it has been used across many centuries to do real harm to real people.

I take from Barnabas the reading habit — look past the surface, find the thing the surface was teaching — and I leave the rest of his argument where I found it. The covenant with Israel was not a mistake corrected later. It was kept, by God, faithfully, and the promises made in it were not withdrawn.

Hold this as a working rule for every ancient teacher in this book: you may take a man's method without taking his conclusions, and you are obliged to say plainly when you have done so. I have tried to say so each time. Where I have not, weigh what I have written against Scripture and set aside whatever fails.

And the reading habit itself is not Barnabas's invention. The prophets were doing it long before. Listen to Jeremiah demand a spiritual reading of a physical command:

Break up your fallow ground, and don't sow among thorns. Circumcise yourselves to Yahweh, and take away the foreskins of your heart.

Jeremiah 4:3–4

The foreskins of your heart. There it is, seven centuries before Christ. True circumcision was never about flesh, any more than the true Temple was ever about stone. It is the cutting away of pride, self-deception, and the refusal to listen.

If we obey only the surface of the text, we miss the heart of God entirely — and we will do it while feeling scrupulously obedient, which is what makes the error so durable.

The Trapdoor

Now the warning I promised you, and it is the most important paragraph in this chapter.

As your eyes begin to open, a new danger arrives immediately, and it is far more dangerous than the blindness it replaces: the pride of the person who thinks he can now see.

This is worse than surface literalism, because the surface literalist at least knows he is looking at surfaces. The man who believes his vision has been cleared has acquired a blindness that congratulates itself. And I can tell you from experience that there is no more insufferable creature in any congregation than the person who has recently learned to read a text for its depths.

I became that man for about three years. I could see the layer beneath everything. I was, I thought, unusually perceptive. What I actually was, was tiresome — and worse, I had begun to use my new sight as a way of ranking people, which is the precise inversion of what it is for.

The guard against this is what I will call the discipline of unknowing: the deliberate, practiced recognition of the limits of your own judgment.

Note how the pillars protect each other here. Without the humility of unknowing, your pursuit of Truth curdles into ideology — a hard, triumphant certainty that looks down. And without it, your Mercy thins into either sentimentality or condescension, which treats people as projects rather than persons.

Humility teaches you that you are not the center of the world. Unknowing teaches you that your view of it is never complete. Hold your conclusions with a loose hand and you stay teachable. Arrogance closes the eyes. Humility props them open.

The Witness

Return to the anchor: Psalm 119:18. Pray it as a request, not a formality.

And note where the Psalmist expects the wondrous things to be found — out of your law. Not out of visions or special experiences. Out of the ordinary, familiar text he has probably read a thousand times. The wonder was always in there. What was missing was the eyes.

The Practice: Three Exercises in Sight

Take these up gently. None of them will feel like progress. That is normal.

The living truth beneath the day. In your dealings with people, look past your immediate irritation or pleasure. Ask: What is the moral weight of this moment? Where is truth trying to speak here? Where is mercy trying to get in? You will fail at this most of the time and notice it hours later. Noticing it hours later is the practice.

The restraint of judgment. When you feel certain you have finally figured someone out — stop. That sensation of having concluded is the exact moment to hold back. You are seeing a fragment. You have always been seeing a fragment. Say nothing yet.

The prayer for sight. When you meet a hard truth or a cold situation, pray Psalm 119:18 about that specific thing. Ask for the gift of seeing the wondrous thing hidden inside that particular difficulty. Not in general. In that.

Ask yourself this week: Where did I look at someone today without actually seeing them? What conclusion am I holding too tightly?

A Blessing

May your eyes be opened to the light that does not fail. May you walk with the steady feet of one who knows the road, and the lifted heart of one who has begun to see what it runs through.

And when you catch yourself feeling perceptive — may you laugh, and be given the grace to start looking again.