Making a Space for Seeing

When doctors first learned how to perform safe cataract operations they went all over Europe and America operating on people who had been blinded from birth by cataracts. When they first learned to see, the vast majority of patients of all ages had a very confused idea of space.

Before the operation, the doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a square. The patient would feel it, maybe touch it with the tongue, maybe bite on it, and name it correctly.

After the operation the doctor would step back and show the same objects to the patient. The patient would have no idea what she or he was seeing. You see, the patients could not come to know about something by looking at it. They had to touch it to know because they had only one way of knowing...by touching.

Upon looking at a person, they seemed to have no idea of the size of the person without touching. When asked how large the person was, the newly sighted patient would hold the thumb and index finger out and measure that way.

When a newly sighted woman was shown a painting, she asked, "Why do they put all those dark marks on it?" "Those things are to show where the shadows are in real life," said her mother. "We need the dark shadows in order to understand what we are seeing. Without the dark shadows everything would look flat to us." "But everything does look flat," said the newly sighted woman. She could not look at an object and understand depth.

What those newly sighted people needed was to have opened to them a way to see...a way to interpret what they were seeing...a way to come to know by seeing. Someone needed to help them make a space for seeing.

That, I think, is what all teaching in Christian schools is about. Teachers at every level need to find ways to help students make a way for their own understanding of God’s truths. Teachers need to help students make a way for their own seeing, a way for their own hearing, a way for their own knowing, a way for their own learning to understand the truths of God’s creation can happen.