glasses
There is perhaps no convenience so humble, so plain and unremarkable in its daily use, as a pair of glasses. While the oculist grinds the lenses and the optician fits the frames, the wearer carelessly hooks the wires behind each ear with the ease of a man tossing on a beaten coat. Though his vision focuses, he thinks nothing more of it.
But let us not be so easily dismissed by the mundane.
The eye, left to its own naked effort, betrays the owner. Words swim, edges dissolve, and what ought to be a face is a scrubbed-out Picasso. And yet, praise to the great human ego, man may not recognize his affliction. He would tell you, with perfect seriousness, that his vision is fine. He would be wrong, but the diluted illusion is all he knows, so it must be the true world. And so, the afflicted man does not reach for a corrective. He dares not dream that what he sees is a mirage, and moves through an approximation of the world, approximately happy.
Until, for some, the scales fall from their eyes. Of course, this is not always welcome. The blurred world is often comforting, and when lens meets eyes, the sudden sharpness can be painful. Sores atop the ears, aches behind the eye, and an endless insistence of detail in the mind that pounds in a disorderly rhythm chanting: there is more that remains unseen.
The corrected man squints. In those first hours, he may long for the soft edges. The world, accurately portrayed, is a thing one must grow accustomed to. In response, some remove their glasses. While this may be understandable, the wise recognize that clarity is not an option, but a demand, for he has now seen a face, and that cannot be undone.
And here, the oft overlooked glasses on the nightstand become more.
Our souls reach within for what they most urgently desire—purpose, guidance, companionship—and find themselves unfit to the task. Like our eyes, they do not recognize their own affliction, moving through an approximation of meaning, approximately satisfied.
For what is faith, in its essential motion, but this same invisible surrender? While theologians offer the lens fit into frames worn smooth by thousands upon thousands of devoted and desperate hands, the believer struggles. Of course, the glasses call to him—put this on, tell us what you see—but faith does not slip on easily. It pinches. It sits uncomfortably on the bridge. The believer squints, and adjusts, and adjusts again. Disoriented as he may be, he will not remove them, for he has seen His face.
The skeptic calls this weakness, and he is not entirely wrong. We are afflicted; our vision is shot. But the eye that refuses the lens on principle does not thereby see more clearly. It simply calls its blur the truth, the sharpened world a fabrication, and stumbles on.
The wise man, knowing his affliction, reaches for the corrective. He sets them on his nose. The world, just like that, is made new. He goes about his day and does not think of miracles.
But a miracle, by any fair accounting, is what has quietly occurred.