Everyone: I'm out this weekend recovering from eye surgery (lasik) that I had this Friday...
Both eyes. All went well, no real pain, and it corrects a pretty bad astigmatism I've had forever.
Happy to say as of yesterday that vision returned enough to read from a computer, and for distance reading I'm at 20/20...(up close is still blurry, and will be till the corneas heal a bit more)...
And especially at night, lights have a particularly angelic halos around them. The 405 becomes particularly glowing and holy looking for a change. The park around from my house seems alive with glowing luminous holy streetlamps.
One smallish note learned from this experience:
I've never been more aware of my eyes as less than perfect "cameras" than when my eye surgeon changes the focus on them manually, without the help from my brain. Any illusion I held before yesterday that that my vision of the world through my eyes were some type of "magic windows" that directly see reality was shattered.
In fact, during the surgery my eyes could "see" my eye's view of the world being distorted and altered like looking through the surface of a pond being rippled. And now, they are routinely and very actually "seeing" things (halos) that aren't there technically.
Much of enlightenment thinking (that the Church has accepted, goes more or less uncritically) goes along with the idea that our perception of Reality is about as direct and perfect as I unconsciously believed my eyes were before. The enlightenment more or less eschewed the idea that as humans we were stuck with an imperfect, human, finite view of the world. Both culture and Church moved away from the more Job-like humble stance that we are creatures and our view and knowledge of both Creation and it's Creator comes with a creaturely POV rife with limitations.
Paul's words never claimed the kind of "objectively absolute knowledge" that only God has. In contrast he said: "Now we see in part, we prophesy in part...like looking through a glass darkly."
Now that my vision is literally like looking through slightly blurry glass (but getting better daily) I get the bigger meaning of the metaphor a lot better too.
Tim
Yeah, getting LASIK is freaky. When I got the procedure there were about 30 seconds where my eyes were wide open (being held open) and I couldn't see a thing. It was one of the scarier experiences of my life.
Thanks for the reflection, Tim. Hope the recovery goes well... I'm sure you'll be thrilled with the results. I know I am.
Posted by: jimmy 5 | March 06, 2006 at 11:40 AM