Glassware by Eric Rennie

I took a course my freshman year in college in which we learned how to see.  I didn't realize that's what I would be taking when I signed up for it.  I thought I would be taking a drawing course, and that's what we did.  But the instructor understood that to draw properly we had to learn how to see.  That proved to be more difficult than you would think, since by that time we had all fallen into the habit of looking without really seeing.  So we filled our sketchpads with straight lines, curved lines, parallel lines, lines of varying thickness.  We drew chairs, tree branches, our own hand.  Gradually, over the course of the term, we were forced to see the world afresh, never taking our eye off an object as our hand painstakingly traced its contours on the page. 

One way to understand Jesus of Nazareth is that he came to teach the world how to see.  If thine eye be single, he said, thy whole body shall be full of light.  "Single" is sometimes translated as "clear" or "good," but the literal meaning of the original Greek is "without folds."  To see the world as it is, without folds, you need to see with a single eye.  This means you need to be able to see the world without naming it.  Language turns everything into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, with all the pieces carefully labeled.  Even if we reassemble the pieces into a coherent picture, it's not the underlying unity we see but a pattern of puzzle pieces.

"Swifter than light the world converts itself into that thing you name," Emerson wrote in his journal, "and all things find their right place under this new and capricious system."  Our most basic concepts about the world --  of time and space, self and other -- are learned at our mother's knee.  These are not phenomena of nature but constructs of the mind. 

"The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds," wrote the linguist Benjamin Whorf.  "We cut nature up, organize it in this way, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language."

To see the world whole again, rather than as merely the sum of its parts, we have to see it with the eyes of a newborn.  This is what Jesus was getting at when he said one must be born anew to see the kingdom of God.  He wasn't talking about some far-off realm or going to heaven when you die.  The kingdom of God is at hand, he said, meaning right here and right now.  It's this world he was talking about, not the world we think we see but the world as God might see it, uncorrupted by all our knowing.