Blinded eyes

Perhaps you were raised on Bible stories, and perhaps you were not. If you were, you will know what I mean when I say that some of that stuff is great storytelling, but it seems as far removed from our day, and our world, and our experience as ... oh ... well, as far removed as a prince falling in love with a princess lying motionless on a bed - a princess who is neither dead nor living, and with whom he's had no conversation. The prince has never even seen her standing up! But he's in love with her. So he kisses her. (yikes! are her lips cold? ew!)

Some of the Bible stories are like that. Some of my favorites are about the prophet Elijah. He got to do all these fantastic things. His things are legendary. His oil didn't run out, and the ravens fed him when he was staying by the brook, and he even taunted the crazed prophets of Bael on top of Mt. Carmel and said something very naughty. He said, "maybe your god is taking a dump and that's why he can't hear you." (It was a study in situation and personality to hear the different ways my teachers told this part of the story over the years - Bible story teachers aren't very comfortable talking about going potty, it seems.)

Then there are all the stories of people who couldn't see what they were looking at. They talked to people they didn't recognize. There were frustrated mobs at Lot's door, trying to get at the visiting angels for other than spiritual reasons - they didn't know those "men" were emissaries from heaven itself - or, I've often wondered - were they so far out of it that they just didn't care? Would recognizing the angels have made any difference to them?

But there are others who didn't recognize their companions, and the best example of all is the post-Resurrection conversation on the road to Emmaus. These people were disciples. They loved Jesus. They were stunned at the recent events. They wanted to see their Lord again. How could they not know him when he was right there? And they talked, and they talked, and they invited the stranger to dinner ...

"When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him." (Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 24)

Wanting to see him didn't make it possible to see him. He made it possible to see him.

Well, fine then. These are still weird stories. Maybe the people in Sodom didn't want to know - and maybe the people in Emmaus wanted to know but weren't ready. But what about me?

A few weeks ago, there was a huge party at the home of my parents. They've been married for fifty years, and they threw the mother of all parties for themselves and invited everyone they know, I think. Among the group was a man I very much did not want to see. In the olden days, before I left The Box and ventured out into the big wide World As It Is, this man had been one of my teachers. A few years ago, he was handed a bit of my writing in which I extolled the wonders of the religion I'd found since leaving The Box. It was a speech I gave during the first years of my Anglicanism, and I was in the full flow of gratitude and had an overwhelming sense of having come home to this expression of historic Christianity. And this man, this former teacher, when he came across this speech, rose up in outrage and wrote me a letter that overflowed with uneducated bias, shock, corrections, and warnings. Apparently, from what he could see, we'd very stupidly put ourselves into a deceitful and dark and devilish box and now I was giving speeches about how much we liked it in there. Less of a Box it could not be for me, but he didn't see it that way. We were in a trap. One of his former students - one of the best ones! - had abandoned everything she knew and formed an allegiance to a Lie and a Trick and a Trap. He was determined to slap us awake.

This was none of his business, of course. But we went ahead - my husband and I, although my husband had been curiously left out of the un-asked for first epistle from this man - it was mostly my patient and agreeable husband who answered all of the man's sentences that ended in question marks. In ordinary society, sentences that end that way are questions. In this case, not so much. That man was willing to correct and admonish, but he wasn't really asking any questions.

Eventually - months later - we ended the "conversation." In fact, I ended it. He'd sent an email and I finally filched the words of Jane Austen and sent them as an answer. My reply was that "You are mistaken, [his name goes here], if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentleman-like manner. From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of our correspondence with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and we had not had this correspondence with you a month before we felt that you were the last man in the world whom we could ever be prevailed on to follow. --- Words by Jane Austen, sentiment by me.''

Get the picture? Things had not ended well. I couldn't think of the man without feeling a little ill. So ... I was not looking forward to seeing him at the party. But, after all, it was going to be a big party, and I figured I could keep my eye out and see him first and lose myself in the crowd. I did see his wife - and found something else to do. But after that ... the oddest thing happened. I completely and utterly forgot about them. The whole thing - never really what I was paying much attention to anyway during the hooplah and chatter and the "I haven't seen you in so long" conversations playing over and over - it just went out of my brain entirely. Poof.

One of the people I did want to say hello too, though, was this man's brother, also a former teacher. I like him. He is kind, and fair, and careful to see things from other perspectives. He is measured in his responses. He's nice. So when he came over to where I was sitting and said, "You have to stand up and give me a hug," I did. And I chattered away like a magpie. We talked about people we knew from way back when. I told him I'd found Larry after all these years, and that the man had gotten married! I'd found Carol too - just recently. Chatter chatter chatter. Happy happy happy.

And then he said the oddest thing. He said that I mustn't be mad at him - just because he "sent me a mean email." ???! I laughed (no clue what we're talking about now) and he laughed - and he repeated himself. And then he walked away.

And then, like a swimmer coming out of the depths below the high dive, I broke the surface and saw what I was looking at. It wasn't him. I wasn't talking to the man I thought I was talking to. I had been chattering away to the very man I had thought I could avoid - it was the other brother! - and I didn't even realize it until he was gone.

So now I believe those old Bible stories in a way I didn't believe them before. I used to believe that God did all that stuff - long ago and far away. God used to show people things or not show people things - open people's eyes or close them. Now, I thought, God just does that with our "understanding." We can spiritually see or not see - it's spiritual for us. It's not like the olden days. Not now.

Only ... apparently it is.