Spirituality: A Journey, a Practice, or Relationship – Part 3 – Practice
A few years ago, I had a stroke. The stroke made me blind on the left side. Both eyes work as well as ever, but now, even in the bright daylight, I can not see anything on the left. If I focus on a person’s nose as they face me, I can see their left eye but not their right eye.
Although the left side of my field of view is not visible, it also isn’t blank. My mind pulls colors and shapes from the visible area and blends them together to create a lovely blurry backdrop filling in the void. (It looks a bit like the optional Zoom background that blurs the scene behind you.) When I look at the world, I see what you see except that it looks like someone has given me sunglasses and smeared lotion on the left side of each lens. Since nothing is blank, it is tempting to think that I can see the things on the left - just in a blurry way. However, time and again, I’m proven wrong when items that had been there all along slowly emerge on the right side of my vision as if moving past the edge of a cloak of invisibility.
That experience is different when things move quickly. While I still can’t see them coming, I can feel them. It is hard to describe but it itches in a weird way, not on my skin - more in my bones. The feeling is vaguely located in the left center of my body. My spine twitches and I squirm before I realize what is happening.
I didn’t understand this sensation so I asked my eye doctor. He explained that our brains interpret motion in a different part of the brain than vision. Most of us don’t know this because the two are tied together. We see something move through our eyes and our brain interprets the two parts of the signal simultaneously. My Doctor further explained that the motion detectors in our brain are closer to the brain stem and more associated with base instincts. This is how animals with little cognitive thought can react so quickly to predator’s lunge. They must feel the same itchy anxiety within their bodies that I feel. My stroke damaged only the part of my brain that interprets visual aspects. While I lost some of my higher level vision, I maintained the instinctual part.
After my stroke, part of my rehabilitative therapy trained me to pay attention to the more instinctual parts of my vision. I stood in a room staring straight ahead while someone threw a soft yellow ball toward me or rolled a large rubber ball in front of me. The therapist taught my husband how to help and he had a little too much fun throwing the ball at my face and surprising me every time. I couldn’t see the ball coming, but sometimes I could feel it. Other times it caught me completely by surprise (fun for him - not so much for me:)
I wondered about the point of the exercise. Why throw things at me that I will never see? But my eye doctor pointed out that I did see it - just not in the usual way. He was teaching me to pay attention to the less developed part of my vision. Over time I have learned to trust the weird feeling I get when things come toward me, to pay attention to it and respond appropriately.
All of us have the same vision, but most of us have never had the opportunity to develop and attend to the more instinctual part of our vision.
Reflecting on that experience, I realized that this is a good analogy for spirituality. We have different forms of perception. Our senses feed us information about the world around us and our minds process the input and attribute meaning. We get so wrapped up in these sensual and cognitive functions that we completely miss the more subtle but ever-present input. In this way, most of us have a blind spot when it comes to God. Our blind spot gets covered up by all the other senses in a blur of busyness that can fill in our blind spot. The busy blur of activities keep us from noticing God’s presence in our every day lives and blind us from our relationship with God. While our lives may look full, we still feel the nagging longing from within. That longing is God’s nudge to pay attention.
Think about the last time your soul was moved. Perhaps you were listening to music or walking in nature. Perhaps you were listening to a friend or sitting beside a loved one. Maybe you were in church, walking through a garden or an art galley. when you felt a moment of astonishment, peace, and love. Maybe you were overwhelmed with beauty or joy. Your mind probably attributed that feeling to the sights and sounds around you: the quality of a sermon or the solo you just heard, the beauty of the stained glass in the morning light, the smiles of your friend. While all of these things are lovely, what if there is more behind that feeling? What if you actually experienced God touching your heart right there where you were? What if God was reaching out to you specifically in this way?
God placed a burning bush in Moses’ path so that he would stop and and pay attention. What “yellow balls” is God rolling in front of you?
