Here is a gratuitous photo of Hannah sitting on a tray. I wonder what she is thinking about. She is probably contemplating new ways to sit on our laps, purr, rub against us, look irresistible, and then bite (hard) if anyone pets her for more than about three little pets. She has a somewhat prickly personality. That is how I think of it.
So when she sits around prettily like this, like a piece of furry performance art, she is really earning her keep. If that is all she has to offer us, I'm okay with that. :D
The vine that comes over our wall from the neighbors has bloomed. This makes me happy every spring. The new neighbors have talked about pulling it out. (It is rooted on their side of the wall.) I hope they don't. They are young and new to both home-ownership and gardening, so I am hoping they pause before running wild with the tearing-stuff-out impulse.
I stuck a new little scrolled iron edging in our backyard a few weeks ago. Can you see it? It tidies things up a bit.
The hydrangeas are starting to bloom. Yay! That also makes me excited. :) These will deepen to the most glorious shades of blue and purple I have ever seen. That whole blue-indigo-violet chunk of the color spectrum is regal, mysterious, and goose-bump-inducing to me.
If you ever need something neat to think about, think about the type of God who would invent color.
Have you ever read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard? I might have talked about this before (did I?) but in it, there is this neat passage where she discusses a book by Marius von Senden called Space and Sight. She writes,
When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients' sense perceptions of ideas and space both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden's opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.
She quotes von Senden's descriptions of several of these post-surgery experiences, which I don't have room to go over here, but I was particularly fascinated by this:
... even at this stage, after three weeks' experience of seeing ... "space," as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i.e. with colour-patches that happen to bound his view. He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen.
Dillard goes on to explain that "in general the newly sighted see color as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult." She again quotes von Senden, who noted that soon after his operation, a patient:
generally bumps into one of these colour-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do. In walking about it also strikes him -- or can if he pays attention -- that he is continually passing in between the colours he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns -- whether entering the room from a door, for example, or returning back to it -- he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see.
Dillard notes that while some experiences of the newly sighted are extremely difficult, some are exceedingly pleasing:
... a twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, "the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: "Oh God! How beautiful!"
I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when I was in college, and it had a profound effect on me. It catalyzed my Biblical conviction that we are foolish to believe that the totality of what we see and understand here on earth is the fullness of reality. Some of my favorite verses in 2 Corinthians say this:
For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.
Tomorrow Bob is helping me get the backyard tidied up for Easter. We are all going to sit outside if the weather is nice, but first Bob and I must drag the tables out there this weekend and figure out the best configuration for twenty people.
I wonder what it was like for the God of the universe, who created space and sight, to experience space and sight as a human. I also wonder what it will be like for us to experience space and sight in heaven, in the direct presence of its creator.
I bet we will repeatedly exclaim, "Oh, God! How beautiful!"
i love jesus and the good news ... that through his death and resurrection he offers us reconcilation with the loving, sovereign, and holy god of the universe. yay!
Recent Comments