“Letting go of self is an essential precondition to real seeing”.
- Freeman Patterson
When we hold onto self, our seeing is blurred by all of our baggage, treasures, fears, joys, failures, victories, successes and insecurities. Life is viewed as either an idealistic possibility that can be reached via self-achievement or as a dead-end road that is ever-constricting until it finds its abrupt end.
From a self-seeing perspective people and creation become just another commodity (objects to our own end; something for us to engulf) or the competitor (afraid they will detract or “take-away” from us we look to destroy). In either case this vantage point is neither life-giving or creative.
Through our hyper-individualized perspective we lose sight of the big picture. As a result, we become enthralled with our own achievement and wrecked by our own failure. This myopic grid, in which we view the world around us, says “it is about you”; about your success, about your joy, about your failure, about your sadness.
But it is not.
It never has been and never will be.
To really see, the myopic grid, the glasses of “self” need to be taken off. Yet here in lies the problem; we believe we can remove our own glasses. This, however, is the old self talking. The truth is we cannot remove the self-fitting-custom-frames on our own.
They must be taken off for us.
Like Jesus’ interaction with the blind man, grace must meet us in the most unpredictable of ways and in the most peculiar of forms. Saliva-made-mud is an unlikely ointment (the antithesis to seeing would be "mud in your eye"). It could be in the form of rejection, a diagnosis, or a heartbreak, but grace will come to you.
In being placed upon you, your likely reaction to the paradox will be, "how is this going to make me see?!?!?". But the seeing doesn't happen when grace comes (as if our "seeing" could be forced or coerced). Our seeing comes when, like the blind man, we respond to being sent.
"Having said this, he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. 'Go,' he told him, 'wash in the Pool of Siloam' (this word means 'Sent'). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing."
May you, when grace comes, stop clinging to your old glasses wishing they could bring the fullness of life into focus. May you in courage, "Go", "Wash" and be given a vision big enough to take in all you were meant to behold.
