The Miracle In My Right Eye

The Miracle In My Right Eye

Last year, I was fortunate to undergo cataract surgery in my right eye. I had endured degrees of clouded vision in that eye since at least 2010.

The replacement of the natural lens was with a toric lens which corrects astigmatism, a fairly common eye condition which, due to the "incorrect" curvature of the eye, causes light to focus in front or "in back" of the retina, instead of on the retina. My vision went from about 20/300 to 20/25.

On the surface, this is a matter of medicine and science. It happens because people devote their lives to the study of diverse disciplines, from engineers who develop polymers, manufacturing methods and equipment, to scientists and doctors who study optics, as well as the physiology of the eye...assisted by nurses and medical professionals who have helped make a surgery which involves the cutting of the cornea and replacement of the lens into the most popular (and one of the safest) procedures performed today. Let's not forget those wacky mathematicians and the sorcery they perform with numbers, concepts and shapes. (That toric thing I mentioned above? It's from a torus, a mathematical shape that is, essentially, a donut. The shape of the lens is derived from a slice of donut. It's a specialized slice, but it's a slice. (I wouldn't be surprised if those sneaky imaginary numbers were somehow involved.)

On the near horizon? Eye drops which will dissolve cataracts.

Some of my favorite TV characters (Person of Interest) recently reminded me of chaos theory, a branch of fractal math which shows that in the midst of chaos and randomness, patterns emerge. Perhaps more example of the orderliness of Universe...perhaps "God"?

There's where the wicket gets sticky: the providence of God – not to mention the existence of God. Brought up Catholic, as a child, with a detour into the Baptist faith, in my twenties...and now? Now, indeed...all these years later, I am no longer certain of the things of which I had no doubt when I was a young man.

The best I can do, for now, is to take the Bible as allegory -- in fact, when done so, most of the contradictions which manifest with literal interpretations, disappear.

Yeshua ben Yosef was an apocryphal Jew who taught that the kingdom of God would be established within the lifetimes of his followers and disciples. (Mark 9:1 -- now, I've seen a nice piece of apologetics to explain away Mark 9:1, and how we're in this mess, two thousand years later. No longer interested. Most apologetic reasoning is too clever by a half, when it isn't just the ol' soft-shoe. Take the act elsewhere. Too many broken hearts for an encore.)

Yeshua. Aramaic = Joshua. Jesus? A Greek translation. So, those who rush to assure us we will be given everything in prayer if we just invoke that mighty name of Jesus? Wrong name. (Hey, don't look at me! I didn't come up with some 35,000 Christian denominations, and how many dozen translations of the "perfect" Word of God. Can't even get out of Genesis before the literal breakdowns start: which, of at least two creation stories, is the correct one? Perhaps it is as Chris Hedges says, that Genesis is not there to tell us how God created the world, but why. [Chris Hedges would be the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with a Master's degree in Divinity from Harvard.]) I digress. I like to digress.

Luke 17:20-21 says "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." Other translations suggest that the Kingdom of God is "among you," or "among us."

Maybe, just maybe, we are "God." All of us, together. Maybe "God" is in the minds of scientists and engineers, teachers and coders, in the hands of nurses and surgeons and first responders, carpenters and crafters, saints and sinners, and in the hearts downtrodden and dashed, broken so...and maybe, if we look, we will see Yeshua in the eyes of "the least of these." Maybe the Kingdom of God is already here. Maybe there's nowhere else to go. In spite of the people who beg and plead for intervention, for Jesus (wrong name!) to come back, for God to save us -- how the return of the Messiah has been immanent for most of my life -- and I am no longer a young man! -- maybe it's up to us to make the needed changes. We will be the ones to save us from ourselves. That wall our collective back is up against? Prison or Paradise? Delight or Doom? We decide.

I am put in mind of the famous passages from Carl Sagan's: "The Pale Blue Dot." I shan't belabor the whole thing, but it's easy to find on the Web, YouTube, and other places on the Internet. Sagan writes about how the entirety of human existence - everything and everyone we've ever known, the aggregate of religions and ideologies and doctrines is found "on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

I close with the following, from Sagan: “The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.”

May we choose wisely. May we live well...and our dreams? May we dream in four dimensions: the entirety of the space-time continuum, and the future...or better stated by others: Live large. Dream big. One Love.