Taking Your Sunglasses Off

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As a reporter doing a story on why Mexican immigrants come to the U.S., I once drove in the front seat of a pickup truck to central Mexico with a Des Moines packing house worker – we’ll call him Hector – his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s 8-year-old daughter. It was a very crowded ride. The back of the pickup was filled with building materials with which Hector intended to remodel his parents’ house.

After a day or two at his home, near the town of Fresnillo in the state of Zacatecas, we visited families who had all worked in Iowa and returned to Mexico with enough money to continue their lives on a little higher economic level. While driving to the ranchos, we drove across a pasture and came to an opening between two barbed-wire fences, an opening large enough to allow a vehicle to go through. Standing to one side was a man who approached Hector. The man held out a palm and Hector placed a few pesos in it.

Grinning, the man returned to the fence and went through the motions of opening an invisible gate. He walked the “gate” from one side of the opening to the other, at which point we passed through. Hector explained that the gatekeeper, Tomás, had been bitten by a rattlesnake as a child, went untreated and wasn’t “right in the head.” To make a living, the community allowed him to collect tolls at the invisible gate.

I was moved by that scene. The community recognized that Tomás, though lacking in the mental resources with which most people were blessed, was a valuable human being who deserved to make a living. They saw him with the eyes of compassion, reminding me about the Gospel passage in which it is reported to John the Baptist that because of Jesus, “the blind see.”    

I’m still reading the book, Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, by Tomas Halik, the Czeck psychotherapist, priest and professor of philosophy and sociology. The book is a treasury of wisdom and insight, and I highly recommend it.

Halik writes about a former student of the university where Halik teaches who comes to him to discuss his spiritual life. The young man had some years before converted from Christianity to Buddhism and had been in a monastery somewhere in the Far East but had decided to return to Christianity. After much silence and some limited dialogue, Halik decides to give him two pieces of advice: Retain what is good in your Buddhist experience, and “learn to see Christianity with new eyes.”

That last phrase is what this blog is about.

Maybe because “familiarity breeds contempt,” our ideas about God and religion are often clichés.

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The act of abandoning his faith and searching elsewhere allowed the young man to see Christianity in a new light, probably similar to how the first Christians saw it. Only with humility, sincerity, and letting go of the clichés can we arrive a little closer to seeing things as they are; in other words, making progress in our search for God.

Halik recalls his own visits to Buddhist and Catholic monasteries, and writes that a Buddhist monk told him that enlightenment isn’t a sudden understanding in which “the heavens part,” but is more like “realizing you’ve forgotten you’re wearing sunglasses and you take them off.”

I believe that’s what is needed in the search for God, to take the sunglasses off, to see faith in a new light. That implies single-mindedness, placing to one side all the obstacles to the search, including the “sunglasses” of society’s common wisdom, the biases of our contemporaries, the social and political controversies in which we get hung up. The most important question for people whose search is sincere is, what can help me find God?

Merely asking that question may not seem like making much progress, but I believe many people never make the question central to their lives and are forever distracted by what counts less. This single-mindedness apples to all of us, by the way, no matter how much, or little, progress we have made, because, Halik reminds us, “Truth is a book that none of us has read to the end.”

If our lives are hectic and full of noise, it won’t occur to us to take the sunglasses off. The search requires thoughtfulness and a certain amount of calm.

 

In watching the recent Wimbledon tennis matches, I was struck by how Bulgarian player Grigor Dimitrov goes to the side of the court between sets and puts a towel over his head, trying to find calm. With the noise of hundreds of spectators, the referees and officials hovering and the pressure to win, I can’t imagine how hard that must be. Apart from tennis matches, a commentator said, Dimitrov often goes alone to parks and isolated places to find peace.

Thoughtfulness is a rare commodity in many people’s lives, but when the sunglasses finally come off, we may think or even say to ourselves, “Oh, yeah. How could I have not noticed?” Once they’re off, we find it more difficult to see someone like Tomás, the imaginary gatekeeper, as a “throwaway,” and we ask, “What if we really are all children of God? What if we really are brothers and sisters? What if we really are stewards of creation?”

The sincere search for God itself is enough to help us see things as they really are.