Seeing Wonders

The eye is not merely passive. “Watch this,” somebody says, and the eye focuses. But on a deeper level, what can reveal the inner governance of our attention, which determines what we truly see?

Last week, our daughter Julia had a seriously inflamed eye. It had none of the usual symptoms of conjunctivitis. The doctor wanted to test it, so he put in an orange dye, and then looked at the cornea with a cobalt-blue light to see if something abnormal turned up—an abrasion, perhaps. Nothing did, and antibiotic drops cured the problem, but the procedure itself struck me as a good metaphor. What kind of test might tell us if there is something wrong with our eyes, not physically, but in how we see things? Last week I wrote about the founding of Wyoming Catholic College to combat the nihilism acquired from early education and from our culture at large. Nihilism affects each of us personally, perhaps without our knowing it. Is there some kind of dye to reveal whether it has marred the way we see?

The eye is not merely passive: we experience a continuous adjustment of its function through attention or inattention. Watch this, somebody says, and the eye focuses. But on a deeper level, what can reveal the inner governance of our attention, which determines what we truly see? Which ways of thinking or knowing actively enhance our seeing and which ways disable it? If there were a dye for the inner eye, it might be a kind of catechetical questioning. Beneath our professions of faith, in our darkest moments, do we trust facts, like all good moderns, instead of believing truths? Do we believe that only verifiable facts are truths, which is like preferring the letter to the spirit? Do we believe that modern science has established as fact that we exist both as a species and as individuals only as biological accidents of matter, or do we believe as true that everything about us is charged with divine intention? Do we consider it a fact that the order of the world is the result of random swerves and combinations over endless eons? Do we think that any meanings, moral excellences, and transcendental purposes are merely fictions that help us tolerate existence? Or do we believe that God is the Maker of all things, visible and invisible?

Many hours of seminar in our curriculum work through such questions. But argument alone is not enough. This week, two different friends sent me an essay first published in the Washington Post making a case for the usefulness of awe. Indeed, awe is useful—more than useful. Wonder is the way into the reality of the world and out of nihilism. Our Philosophical Vision Statement uses the word “wonder” thirty times. In a section on our outdoor program, the PVS says that “In the manmade world, man himself is the first cause and final goal of all things. What room is there for wonder to ascend, when nothing is higher than man? How can wonder long to gaze in love on the roots of the world, when man himself is better than the world and in fact its root?” Exactly.

Belittle this, says the nihilist when his eye looks out on all of creation.

The test of the health of seeing is the capacity for wonder. Just yesterday, after a hard year, I felt my sight renewed by wonder twice. First was simply the occasion of Mass on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in our new oratory, which will be called Immaculate Conception, the name of the church first built on that site over a century ago. It was bursting with students, with faculty and their families, with outsiders who could not pass up the occasion of the first Mass in this building for six decades or more. It was a splendid occasion, awe-inspiring, not least because of the way we acquired the building through the generosity of the late Chuck Guschewsky.

But the second thing that made me wonder was the mother just in front of me and her daughter, who is two years old. I was standing in the back, and the child was looking past me with clear light blue eyes, out the open door of the oratory, toward the west and the Wind River Mountains. Her gaze was full of a two-year-old’s pure fascination. I kept thinking of a line from Shakespeare: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Early in 2019, a placental abruption almost killed her mother—she was life-flighted to Denver—long before the child herself was viable. All through that spring, her mother was in the hospital, month after month, far from her other children in Lander, amazing the doctors and waiting it out, trying to bring this little girl safely to birth as the extended family and the community united in support and prayer. When she was born, still very premature, her lungs were very vulnerable. Then came COVID and its terrible perils.

And here before me on this great Solemnity in our new oratory was lovely little Macrina. I could not stop watching her. By the end of Mass, she was alternately bowing from the waist toward the altar (no doubt imitating the behavior of her Byzantine-rite family on other occasions) or doing a dance to the music of the liturgy, all her own, in her little black cowboy boots.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.