Polychromasia
Ministerial Meandering
Polychromasia
I suspect that there are many of you reading this who have experienced what I am about to describe. You are the lucky ones who have had your cataracts replaced by implanted lenses of some sort or another. At least, I hope you are lucky, and have had a good result.
I am in the middle of having had one eye done, and waiting for the other to be operated upon in a few weeks. That leaves me with the most bizarre vision.
Depending upon which eye I open, the world is either bright, washing-powder white - or has a familiar yellowish tinge to it from the unoperated eye. I wondered for a moment if Huskies - who often have heterochromia (eyes of different colours) experienced the same, until a moment’s reflection told me that they don’t look through the coloured iris, but the lens. Our unoperated lenses are cloudy, and that makes our vision take on a yellowish hue.
Then there is the fun and games of how to focus, which eye to use, and whether to try and wear your glasses or not. Now, I realize that this is not the most important issue in the world, or even the most interesting - but it does provide a challenge for those of us who have had the experience. But getting the world into focus mentally is a lot more challenging than the ophthalmological version.
How we view things and interpret them is not easy. Not only because we often don’t get them into focus - in other words we don’t fully understand what it is we are faced with - or we misinterpret the image; rather like thinking that a D is an O on the Snellen vision testing chart.
With the Snellen’s test charts, a simple flip of another lens into the frame clears our sight, and the correct letter comes into view. Not so with our mental vision. What we have been ‘seeing’ as one thing for years - say, an insult, a hurt of some kind, even a love we thought inconsequential - turns out later, when our mental vision clears, to have been misinterpreted all along. The hurt was never intended, the insult wasn’t even meant for us, and the love was deeper and more real than we ever suspected.
Our mental eyes need testing every so often, just as our physical eyes need check-ups. But we get lazy, and we can’t be bothered to make the effort to look any deeper into our misconceptions; after all, we have been complacent with them for years! Indeed - ‘comfortably numb’, as Pink Floyd sang in their 1979 album, The Wall.
This is a dangerous place to be. If you choose to exist in Lewis Carroll’s world of Alice in Wonderland, where ‘life is but a dream’, you risk ‘la vie manqué’ - which is yet another form of existential crisis where you live in a state of suspended animation, looking for meaning and waiting for death.
However, clearing your mental vision is likely to be a painful business. The emotional wake-up call that you get when you finally tumble to the epiphany of your mental blindness will be uncomfortable, to say the least. It is the same as when you see - for the first time - what Jesus really accomplished for you and me on the Cross; an epiphany of truly life-changing proportion.
That puts my cataracts into a different focus.
Philip+