Steve West: Looking vs. seeing

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, August 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Last week, author and theologian Frederick Buechner died in his home at the age of 96. Steve West now with a reflection on Buechner’s life.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: A few weeks ago my wife and I were cleaning out some files and discovered the pellet-pocked National Rifle Association BB Gun target saved from her happy years at Camp Yonahlossee. Not a sentimentalist, she threw it away. I retrieved it and retained it, a reminder of her aptitude. It’s in a manila folder marked “resources,” a place where I file clippings and salvaged memorabilia. I pull it out of the folder and examine it again. Some shots went wide, clipping the edge of the target. Yet a number hit their mark, I note, sobered by her eye, by her resolute fire.

She’s always had a good eye. In 1987 when we were in Kenya and Tanzania on safari, she spotted a serval cat at a distance of over a thousand feet without the aid of binoculars. Our guide, Elvis, was impressed, if initially doubtful. “Good eyes, madam,” he said, after confirming her sighting.

My eyes are not so good. I’ve been severely near-sighted since third grade, and now I have “floaters.” It’s like looking through spidery webs, particularly noticeable when looking at a bright sky. There’s no recommended treatment. Remarkably, the brain has a way of filtering them out of consciousness. You eventually don’t notice them as much.

In one of his memoirs, Eyes of the Heart, Frederick Buechner lets us peer into something he calls his Magic Kingdom. It’s a term for his palace of memory, or the objects that summon memories for him. Looking around the various photos and other memorabilia of his study, he summons up voices from the past, lets them speak to him and he to them. He concludes his book this way:

What is magic about the Magic Kingdom is that if you look at it through the right pair of eyes it points to a kingdom more magic still that comes down out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. The one who sits upon its throne says, “Behold, I make all things new,” and the streets of it are of gold like unto clear glass, and each of its gates is a single pearl.

If we have the eyes to see, Buechner is saying, then everything points beyond itself to something greater. Yet when I train my eyes on life, I don't always fare so well. Things are not quite in focus. The spidery webs of brokenness born of detachment occlude my vision. I often miss the mark and go wide. Yet with the graces of Word and prayer, I begin to see more of the Kingdom.

What is it that the Apostle says? Having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that you may know the hope to which he has called you. That’s my target. That’s the serval cat in my sights. That’s the Reality beyond my occlusion. Lord, give me eyes to see.

I’m Steve West.

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