Open Writing

Since the age of ten, I haven't had the full picture. My visual field is fragmented, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. I live with an eye condition called macular degeneration, which begins with a slight fading of the pigment in the macular or focal point and ultimately leads to complete blindness.

At present, in middle age, I am conscious of how much I do not see when I gaze in front of me. There is a room, a window, a desk, a table, a computer, a lamp and a dog on the floor. Yet how much of this is seen and how much supplied by my brain? The truth is, at one glance, I only take in scraps of information - an edge of the desk, a corner of the computer, part of the lamp-stand, and a portion of my labrador's belly. The rest isn't there. It's not even black or grey. It just doesn't exist.

When I concentrate a bit harder on the images reaching my brain, I become aware of a lot of flickering. As my eye moves imperceptibly the light falling on the cones and rods in my retina is intermittently absorbed by the remaining dark pigment. This then triggers signals to my brain. The signals are translated into disconnected picsils which would be meaningless, except that my brain links them up with stored information about the way things ought to look and successfully produces impressions of complete objects.

This, then, is the world in which I live: It has large gaps which I am often unaware of. It contains objects that are flickering impressions of reality. And it is heavily reliant on memory, which everyone knows has a tendency to fade over time and become inaccurate.

This brings me back to the point of this article. What does it mean when you don't have the full picture? The condition I have described corresponds directly, I believe, to a condition found in the world today. That condition is spiritual macular degeneration. It is the inability to see what we cannot see.

Straightforward spiritual blindness is commonly understood. It is the habit of blocking out what we don't want to know about. Jesus called the Pharisees blind because they refused to see their own hypocrisy. People are spiritually blind today when they deny the need to integrate with other communities, conserve the earth's energy resources or address poverty in the third world. Although such spiritual blindness is a threat to our physical well-being, it now has the attention of international bodies, governments and the media. Spiritual macular degeneration is a far more insidious ailment.

Firstly, it blots out parts of reality without seeming to do so. We are a society that has more information at our fingertips than any other in history, yet we are unaware of how little we actually know. We have become reliant on technology and have simultaneously turned away from God. This is not to say we ought to become religious. I use the term "god" loosely, to refer to a higher state of consciousness which follows different rules to those of human reason. The way we fill in the gaps in our experience is chiefly determined by what we think or feel, whereas the way God fills in the gaps is very often by creating new and unforeseen situations - designed especially to subvert our arrogance.

The second feature of spiritual macular degeneration is that it produces a flickering visual field. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that our view of reality is only an impression. It is not stable, constant or precise. What we consider fact is often a combination of immediate sensory perceptions and stored judgements, attitudes or emotions. Thus, it is tainted by our past. We think we are encountering the world as it is, but we are actually only semi-aware of the truth; only half-conscious.

Finally, spiritual macular degeneration makes increasing use of memory with the passing of time. As we rely more and more on our own judgements, attitudes and emotions, the possibility of delusion steadily increases. This is to be expected with age, yet it impacts negatively on quality of life. The more set in our thinking we become, the less open we are to novelty, innovation and surprise. Reality changes but we stay the same, growing progressively more bitter and resistant as time goes by.

What is the solution? I can only speak from my own experience of the physical condition, but I believe it has strong relevance. With regard to the moth-eaten nature of our visual field, we have to accept that it is so. We don't have the full picture and never will. With regard to the slightly skewed input of our brains, we must learn to focus on the present without resorting to retrospection. The past is over, never to return. With regard to the inevitable decline of memory, we must seek truth beyond ourselves and our own limited life experience. Security and peace are best found in a living faith, based on the testimony of reliable witnesses.