I spent last week in London on a theatre tour. Aside from being a great time, seeing seven plays in eight days reminded me once again of the value of stories, especially ones that are told well.
Stories invite us into the lives of others in ways that ordinary interactions with real people cannot. One of the themes that kept recurring in so many of the plays I watched was something I call “God-blindness” – an inability to see or believe in God or divine love and forgiveness. Watching a play – or a movie, television show, even a novel, allows us to appreciate the reasons for a character’s loss of connection to the Almighty more readily because the storytelling grants us access to the inner life of the persona. Here we can process how horrific tragedy or injustice has poisoned someone against the world. Here we can detect how misplaced guilt or magical thinking has led another into a warped perception of life. Here we can observe the cruel fallout that results from people not being loved.
Hopefully, our exposure to God-blindness in a story primes us to become more sympathetic to it when we encounter it in “real” life. We begin to see that most people are not “willfully” blind to God. If we get to know them well enough, their conclusions about the deity often make a lot of sense in the context of their lives.
More than that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we remember moments in our own lives when pain or fear have also blinded us to God. I’ve known times when I felt like I was standing paralyzed on a tightrope over an abyss. Anyone who has faith already can still go through what Bonheoffer calls “the dark night of the soul,” and eventually see by the enhanced vision of hindsight that God had safety nets in place throughout the ordeal. But what about the person who has not yet been properly introduced to God?
The Lord calls us to look out for the God blind with the empathy that springs from our own dark nights. Sometimes, falteringly human as it is, our love is the only corrective lens that allows the unconnected to glimpse God.
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