When Samsul Arifin returned to his village in east Java, his father took one look at him and collapsed. He couldn't believe that his son could see. Samsil's people believed his blindness was karma, his fate. So the Australian ophthalmologist had to persuade him that it's his (the doctor's) karma to alleviate blindness!

Another Javanese boy, 16, had been blind for years. After his operation he was so emotional he couldn't bring himself to lift the pad off his eye. The doctor soothed the boy and lifted the pad.The world swam into focus. He could see. The boy wasn't the only one weeping for joy! [1]

In half the world you meet blind persons begging in any city street. They advertize their blindness by calling out or wailing, or with the help of a sighted child to accost passers-by. But it's the 'hidden blind' in rural villages who suffer most. They are a burden to their communities. Because they can't contribute to the work of food-gathering they lose dignity. Throughout these countries you'll find ophthalmologists from many Western nations doing their healing work at an amazingly low cost: an operation with a price-tag of $2000 in a Western hospital can be done for around $50 in a Third World country. 

I was once asked to preach at a church service for the blind. Who was I, with good sight, to offer any wisdom to these special people? I decided during the week before to borrow a white cane, got my wife to tape up my eyes, and with her nervously following me I made my way to the railway station, bought a ticket, and went to the city of Melbourne. People were very kind: they guided me to a seat. One woman asked where I was going and volunteered to take me there. 'Have you been blind for long?' she asked. 'Not long,' I replied.

The whole experience was pretty scary. I'd never thought of some issues quite fundamental for a blind person. When you pay for something, how do you know which bank-notes are what? It's not too bad walking along a footpath, tapping your cane against shop fronts: but how do you know when you're approaching a street, with traffic? You hear the sound of screeching brakes, one blind wag told me! (And he said he would lightly touch the person he was talking to in a crowd to make sure he was the right distance away, with the right voice-volume. Once he uttered a long monologue to a curtain!).

I have regularly met visually-impaired people who attended that service back in the 1970s. They do not remember anything else I said other than the story of my blind adventure - and I had spent many hours preparing that sermon!

I have a visitors' card in my files handed in by a blind person that night. He or she wrote: 1. If you are in need of help, stand still. Even if you are not blind your heavenly father will send someone to you. This is the major lesson one learns from the blind. 2. Australian bank notes vary in size. Each higher value is larger. This doesn't apply in other countries. 3. Silver coins have milled edges; copper coins plain. This applies in most countries. (This person's writing was very legible and the lines were straight: which raises another question - how did they do that?)

The courage of the blind is often an inspiration. When Bramwell, son of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army broke the news to his father that he would never see again, the old man responded: 'Son, I have done what I could for God and the people with my eyes. Now I shall do what I can without my eyes.'

The Melbourne Age (6 October 1991) ran a two-page story about an Australian-born blind professor, John Hull, who insisted that being blind is 'a hobby - not my main business.' The main business is his work as professor of religious education in Birmingham University! His book Touching the Rock, An Experience of Blindness, has become well known.

I read about the gospel singer Ken Medema, blind since birth, saying he'd miss being blind if he regained his sight. He touches the elbow of the person he's talking with, which adds a tactile dimension which seeing people normally do not practice. If he regained his sight he would miss his 'sonar hearing' ability - knowing by echoing sounds when approaching a wall or building. But, he added, he'd like to see people's faces!

I have counseled many blind people, and I've discovered that they're not all the same. Some do not share Ken Medema's joy-in-living. Helen Keller spoke for some of these when she said, 'Blindness is to live immured, baffled, all God's world of colour shut out. It is to sit helpless, staring into the dark, with nothing but the dark staring back, whilst one's spirit tugs at the fetters.' (But when she was asked if there were not a greater misfortune, she added, unforgettably: 'Yes - it is to have eyesight, and not be able to see!')

Singer and composer Stevie Wonder never saw his blindness as the handicap others did. 'One of my teachers told me I had three strikes against me: that I was poor, black and blind, and the only thing an uneducated blind person could do was make rugs and pot-holders.' Within a few years Wonder was being billed by his record company as 'the 12-year-old blind genius.' 'Being blind,' he says, 'you don't judge books by their covers; you go through things that are relatively insignificant and pick out things that are more important. The people I feel sorry for are those who have sight but still don't see.'

Blind children, in particular, ask interesting questions. Frank Sinatra once said his most moving experience occurred while visiting a six-year-old blind child. 'It was windy, and I brushed the hair out of her eyes and told her the wind had been blowing her hair. She stopped me cold when she asked, "What color is the wind?" [2]

Blind people receive a lot of attention in the Gospel stories. They are often Jesus' top candidates for healing. They see, then they believe. But to a doubting follower Jesus said, How blessed are those who have not seen, yet believe. Physical sight is not a prerequisite for faith. The old adage 'Seeing is believing' is reversed. You believe first. Afterwards you see. It is belief that provides the vision, not vice versa. Sure, it's difficult to believe without seeing. But while Jesus had no problem working with those who saw first then believed, he offers something special to those - with or without physical sight - who believe without seeing. Another of Jesus' followers, Peter, later wrote to people suffering persecution for their faith in Jesus: 'Although you have not seen him you love him. And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him. And you experience an indescribable joy!' 

A young Jew scratched these words on the wall of a Warsaw ghetto: 'I believe in the sun, even if it does not shine. I believe in love, even if I do not feel it. I believe in God, even if I do not see him.'  Blindness, according to the biblical prophets, may be voluntary as well as involuntary. One can choose to be blind. Spiritual blindness - the refusal to see reality God's way - is even more profoundly terrible than physical blindness. The people Jesus accused of being 'blind leaders of the blind' knew their Bibles off by heart. They were very prayerful, very religious - good people (in the worst sense of the word!) So it's possible to know the Bible backwards, to know all the theory, all the doctrine - and still not really 'see'! Frances Thompson touched a tender spot when he said '…  Some have eyes and will not see; and some would see and have no eyes.'

The parable of the last judgment in Matthew 25 is about not seeing Jesus when he is right there in our space. The basis of our eternal judgment is all about the kind of seeing done by each of us. The least important person - is Jesus! The marginalized person - is Jesus! The alien person, the enemy, the sinner - is Jesus! She is not a prostitute: she is an unrepeatable miracle of God's creation (more than 90% of whom have been seriously abused in their childhood). Religious or 'moral' people often allow 'adjectives to function as nouns'. The politician, the postman, the neighbour, the blind person… is a person! The Indonesian soldiers who are slaughtering defenceless people in East Timor as I write this - they are humans too. So we must get out of the habit of only 'seeing' superficially. Mother Teresa was always encouraging us to do this, by saying she viewed the dying person left in the Calcutta gutter as if he or she were Jesus…(Two children were talking in Sunday School about the story of the two disciples walking to Emmaus after Jesus' resurrection, who didn't recognize him until he had gone. 'How do you know when you are blind?' one of them asked. 'You don't,' his friend replied. 'You only know after you can see.').

An American preacher back in the 1960s, John R. Fry, thundered: 'The story of the deliverance of [the blind man] Bartimaeus should be required reading [for an understanding] of a fundamental blindness in the land. Not merely an unwillingness but an inability to see the rank disparity in the living situations of the poor to the rich… Derelicts were accepted by Jesus, therefore, as models of the deeper misery that afflicts mankind… Our deeper blindness: an affliction of the spirit, some deformity of affection, some crippled courage… On the road with Bartimaeus, if we cry hard enough and assault Jesus with sufficient impertinence, [we can be delivered from] these great blindnesses…' 

Every culture has a proverb about 'sighted' people not seeing. The Dutch: 'Those have the greatest blindness who think they have none.' The English: 'There are none so blind as those who will not see.' The Italians: 'One may have good eyes and see nothing.' The ancient Persians: 'A blind man who sees is better than a seeing man who is blind.'

A prayer: Lord, may the light of your beauty and your truth be in our hearts and minds. And, whether we have physical sight or not, may we truly see you, and see you in others. Amen. 

Rowland Croucher

September 1999.

[1] The story of Samsul Arifin was told in The Australian Magazine, March 14-15 1998, pp. 30 ff.

[2] Kitty Kelley, His Way - the Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, New York: Bantam, 1987, p. 333.

[3] From a brilliant sermon on the blind man Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52) by John R. Fry, 'Blindness' in Thomas G. Long & Cornelius Plantinga, A

Chorus of Witnesses: Modern Sermons for Today's Preacher, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1994, pp. 144-145.