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| Color Me Thine |
I'm up for a couple hours, reading, thinking, browsing, watching. Watching the sky over Oakland change from pre-dawn gray to brilliant blue. Others, more perceptive and poetic than I, have written about the beauty of the dusk, and the clarity of even the darkest night. Not me. I need the day. I long for the sun. It's not that I'm afraid of the dark, I don't dread nightfall any more than I fear falling asleep. Indeed, I enjoy a moonlit stroll or some summer stargazing as much as anyone... but I need the daylight because I need to know reality.
The rise of the sun on this Sunday did not create the colors outside my window, it revealed them. My eyes, unable to absorb what's "really out there" are healed of their nightly color blindness and the spectral gradient emerges. It's a blessing, I believe, that the colors of day evolve from the gray rather than suddenly snapping into sight. What if our perception of colors were only switched on or off like an Instagram filter or like a window shade sprung open next to a drowsy spouse who hasn't had her coffee yet? What if, as each day dawned the eye needed a particular threshold of light for the low light rods to hand off color sight to the cones? Yes, our magnificent brains would adapt, but today I'm grateful for the emergent ability of the eye to shift from shades of gray into ROYGBIV reality.
This is the day, with all its colorful resplendence, that the Lord has made... let us rejoice with what is, and be glad in it. This is a lovely day to take stock of whatever it is you believe about reality. The part we can observe now and those parts not yet revealed to our senses. Do the eyes of your heart see the full spectrum of reality? Is there for you, as sometimes happens for me, a flickering back and forth as my soul wavers between dark doubts and vibrant, full spectrum faith?
I'm genuinely interested in your input. As I think about the beliefs expressed or implied by my virtual and face to face friends... I am amazed at both the variety and the reluctance to talk about it. If I sent you off to a COLOR BLINDNESS test there would be 8% of you who would discover (if you haven't already) that you have some level of color vision deficiency. I doubt that anyone would feel embarrassed about it. I doubt that any of your color-seeing friends would shame you about your condition. I would also NOT anticipate that a colorblind friend would insist that the rest of us are wrong and that the colors we say we enjoy are just made up constructs in our heads.
Yet something like this happens very often when people who say they're honestly agnostic are embarrassed by what they perceive to be "faith-pushing". Religious folk of various stripes each have their own areas of black and white thinking. And then there's the aggressive new atheists who insist that the black and white of materialism and secular humanism will soon explain any need for a spiritual life, that indeed no such "thing" exists and that we should all be content to grow up and see the world as they do, without the color of a Creator.
No one should be surprised at this point that I'm going to advocate a gradient view of the spiritual world. There is a need in each of us to be able to "see" in black and white, to see at least some color when it comes to spirituality and to let our "inner eye" (the extra perception of our soul) operate between these realities on a daily basis. What if the wonder of the eye can teach us in this regard. Whether you believe it evolved or was created this way by an intelligent designer... we all agree that the rods and cones in our eyes are key to the perception of color and that (when healthy) they hand off the job of adjusting from darkness to daylight without jarring the brain.
What if that "thing" which many traditions call the soul, has its own set of rods and cones. A person's spiritual sight would then have "night vision" receptors that insist on some things being black and white. The cry for personal justice is an indicator that just such receptors are as real as the rods in our eyes. For example, Mr. Cultural Relativist may insist that it is not for us to judge "tribe X" cannibalism as morally wrong... but if "tribe X" captures C.R.'s child and then invites him to the dinner party, something deeper than survival instinct tells this father that what has happened is "evil" and not just "different".
As colors fade and intensify during this partly cloudy day, I invite your response.
I invite you to gauge your inner sight and talk about it, or challenge my theory if you think it's nonsense.
But friends, let's not keep silent just because we feel insecure or embarrassed by our colorful faith, or lack thereof. Perhaps the shame has mostly come from some of us "religious types" who insist that the Creator of all color also cares about what you say and do and see ... and this flies in the face of what we think is our freedom. Perhaps that's just a reality that we don't want to admit yet.
So "Call it"... Where would you say you're at today?
a. Spiritual but not religious (new age, universe, the force)
b. Non-theistic (agnostic, atheist, philosophical buddhism)
c. Cultural monotheism (non-practicing except for major holidays)
d. Practicing monotheism (Christianity, Judaism, Islam)
e. Evolving
f. Failing
g. Some mix of the above
h. None of the above
Of course, the postmodern fear of absolutes and the modern quest to categorize everything each has negative consequences. But every day you make these judgment calls in all sorts of little ways. Just as GIGO applies to computers and nutrition, so too the spiritual life. Garbage in, garbage out... I know many Christians for example who are barely alive (spiritually) due to their steady consumption of fear based news, angst driven hellfire preaching, conspiracy riddled radio, and rapture ready fiction. It is sad but not surprising that I do not see great evidence of the fruit of faith, hope and love in the lives of these my spiritual brothers and sisters.
Their world is every bit as black and white as the materialist who consumes a steady diet of Nietsche, Freud, Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens to keep reinforcing their unbelief. The evangelist, the jihadist, the scientist and the philosopher are equally blind the moment they believe they have seen all there is to see. Each may attempt to quiet that nagging "inner perception" that there's more out there, but reality is a stubborn thing. It is a prism that draws any available light and bends it ever so slightly to make complex those things we desperately want to be simple.
So embrace your black and whites... and share your spectrum.
How do you see the world outside your window today?
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| Unfiltered. Reality? |
