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On Her Blindness
To you I lift up my eyes, Psalm 123:1
Judy A. Johnson
I’ve been preparing to be blind since my early thirties, when I was first diagnosed with ocular hypertension, which is often a precursor to glaucoma. I began planning immediately. By the end of the week, I had devised a system for hanging my clothes so that I wouldn’t mismatch colors and had chosen a name, since forgotten, for my seeing eye dog. I’ve never been one to waste an emotional crisis. I knew about seeing eye dogs from college days with April and her black lab, Matt. Matt would come to class and lie down, peacefully slumbering (along with some of the basketball team) through lectures. I also knew about blindness from a student at the college where I worked. Brian remained after graduation as an announcer at the radio station. He was exceedingly bright, and maneuvered through our small town with a cane. No dog. He joined a group of us on a trip to Vermont, where we taught a week of Vacation Bible School and sang in nursing homes. Brian brought along his portable braille typewriter. While the rest of us oohed and ahhed at the amazing scenery, Brian typed out his lessons. He and I team-taught the sixth grade class. After I complained that he was too stiff with the kids, tied to his notes instead of teaching, he put his notes behind his back to read them. Tom, his roommate on that trip, told me that one night he was having trouble falling asleep—small, indecipherable sounds kept coming from Brian’s bed. “Brian, what the heck are you doing?” Tom finally asked. “I’m reading. Go to sleep.” Tom then allowed the fluttery sounds of fingers playing over the raised braille letters to lull him to slumber. <> I’ve long made it my practice to distrust and sabotage doctors of all sorts, a legacy from my treatment for scoliosis. As an adult, I refuse to give them titles, a little passive aggressive behavior I’m sure they don’t mind. I fought my current optometrist when he wanted me to use medicated drops to lower the pressure in my eyes. I remembered too keenly my mother putting eye drops in her mother’s eyes for glaucoma, and Gran’s broken English, “Ach, dat shtings.” Odd, that despite the lack of genetic connection, we all have had eye troubles. Seeing straight in our family wasn’t easy. “I won’t do it,” I insisted. “I’m not going to tell you I’ll do it and then never fill the prescription.” “You know what, Judy? I like you—you’re a straight shooter. I’m recommending the actions I would if you were my wife, my sister.” Ultimately, I gave in, of course. To continue doing nothing except try to kill the messenger didn’t seem in my best interest. For years, the medicine kept my pressures within acceptable ranges. Then John began asking me to see a glaucoma specialist, who knew so much more about the disease. Resist, then give in. But by all means, do it ungraciously. That’s my style. So at my first meeting with David, I was on the defensive, and consequently belligerent. I don’t claim it’s an attractive defense mechanism, but it gets me through temporarily, like a cat puffing up to scare off a large dog. That the man is there to help me, that I am in fact paying the man to help me, is not at issue here. Fear of blindness is. The curt, haughty frostiness helps me survive. David has me take a field test, measuring peripheral vision. Every time I see a pinpoint of light on the dark screen, I am to press a little clicker in my hand. The first time I took the test in his office, John had to stop it. So frightened was I that he would “find something,” some permanent, irreversible damage, that I broke down weeping. John did what any sensible man would do; he sent in his assistant Peggy to administer the rest of the test and hold my free hand. At David’s office, I did pretty well. When reviewing the results with me, he said I was a little trigger-happy, but he had no idea that he had narrowly escaped a sobbing hysteric. I have my pressures checked every few months. Sometimes my pressures are up, and John makes “tsk-tsk” noises and gives me another lecture about the insidiousness of glaucoma. Last summer he told me about a new technology that maps the nerves of the eye, rather like an infrared map. This allows optometrists to track the damage. David had one of the few machines in the city. Would I please, please, please go back to see him? I was already late for my lunch date. Letting John set up the appointment, so I could avoid another of his lectures and get to the restaurant, seemed the easier choice. I determined to be nicer to David. It wasn’t his fault that my eyes have been under a lot of pressure for decades. I also took along some writing to edit. I find that taking along work I really want to do is an excellent strategy; it seems to forestall the lag time in a waiting room filled with old issues of People or Golf Digest. Pictures of my eye were promptly taken, and then David came in to look at the resulting nerve map with me. I wasn’t expecting him so soon. At the sound of the door opening, I looked up, a large, lime green plastic paper clip in my mouth. “You have a growth on your lip,” he deadpanned. “We can deal with that, too.” So we started out in a friendly fashion, which helped a bit when he showed me the clearly mapped nerve damage. “The thing which I feared has come upon me,” as the psalmist said. “Okay,” I said calmly enough, “Everyone’s eyes are important. But my eyes are important. They are my living; I’m a writer.” And a reader, I might have added. “Everyone’s eyes are important,” David confirmed gravely. “What are we going to do?” “We’re going to lower the pressures.” And he did, using a second medicated drop. There’s no real remedy. He wants to do another field test. They’ll measure the damage every few years. Meanwhile, I’ve begun preparing mentally for eye surgery, which I expect within the next decade. We seem—John, David, and I—to be one of those odd three-person sack race teams, working together against my perhaps not inevitable blindness. <> In my sixth-grade school photo, I’m sporting smoky gray cat-eye frames, with real rhinestones in the corners. But I hated wearing glasses, would, in fact, generally not wear them. My parents never “made” me do much of anything; I think that, at that point in my life, particularly with the ongoing scoliosis treatment, they didn’t have the energy to push one more thing. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I seriously needed glasses. Although my vision may have degenerated even had I regularly worn corrective lenses, I blamed myself for the increased difficulties. I have worn glasses ever since. Contact lenses have never interested me—the idea of poking myself in each eye every morning is as unappealing as the idea of pushing a tiny metal post through the soft flesh of each ear. Besides, I have watched friends lose contacts in their eyes as well as out, slice them with their fingernails, and weep when the lenses went in wrong. It always looked to be more hassle and pain than it was worth. One consolation has been watching my optometrists disagree, each of them casting his predecessor as a black-Stetsoned villain. The first put me in bifocals by the time I was nineteen. The second took me out of them, though he did say that at twenty-five I had the eyes of a forty-year-old. A third overcorrected and put me back in bifocals. John can still barely control his rage that his unknown colleague did nothing about the ocular hypertension except speak about glaucoma as inevitable. Now I’m asking for trifocals, which he won’t give me. I can only hope someone else later disses him for it. <> Saint Paul exhorts his readers in various congregations to walk in newness of life, in love, worthy of our calling, as children of light, in the Spirit, in wisdom. “We walk by faith, not by sight,” he writes to the Corinthians. I’ve always struggled with that last item. What’s wrong with a little sight? I regularly ask God. I’m just clay, remember? I recall walking from the church to the parking lot one morning sometime in 1993, when I was trying to decide to quit my job and go to seminary. The sermon is long gone from my mind. What remains is the sound of the Voice I hear as God’s, asking me a bit impatiently, Can’t you just walk by faith? No, I replied, startled into honesty. <> On my morning walks, I like observing, picking out details, letting my eyes rest on the river. Seeing, really seeing, is the artist’s challenge. Walking also reminds me that life is a pilgrimage. I choose the day’s path according to my perceived need. Some mornings I need an easy path; some mornings I select one that is rocky and requires my walking stick because that’s what life feels like. The rockiest path runs along a stretch of Clifton Gorge where the water rushes so loud and joyously that I forgive the trouble the rocks make for my feet. One morning as I walked that path, exulting in the new day, I suddenly wondered whether coming here would be worthwhile if I couldn’t see. Never mind the impracticality of trying to walk on an uneven path tangled with giant roots without my eyes to help me. The point was, would there be enough there for my other senses? Surely yes -- the sound of the river, even if I couldn’t see it. But what if I couldn’t hear it either? The next thing I knew, I was mentally walking in the woods with Helen Keller, describing the scene to her, placing her hands on the rough- textured bark and delicate green leaves, crushing a stalk of wild mint for her. <> Helen Keller’s story has long intrigued me. As a young person I heard a recording of her Another blind woman, the nineteenth century’s Fanny Crosby, was one of the very few women represented in the hymnals of my youth. What was probably her most famous hymn, “Blessed Assurance,” was a staple of Sunday night church sings. According to the story, a man once visited her and either played or hummed a tune he’d made up. When he asked her what the music said, Crosby replied, “Why, it says ‘Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,’” and thus another Victorian hymn was born. But Crosby gave me hope as a woman -- she was a poet, a wife, and a mother, as well as blind. Another source of hope was John Milton, whose poetry we studied in my high school literature classes. I found his sonnet “On His Blindness” a moving testament to faith in God. I understood in some tiny part of myself how a blind person could not give up creating, how the poetry Milton could still hear in his head must have sustained him, even though he was forced to dictate his words to his three patient daughters. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” the closing line of the sonnet, gave me comfort in my own situation of feeling permanently disabled, even after the successful spinal surgery. Literature is peppered with the blind who can “see”: Teresias, the blind prophet who foretells Oedipus’s downfall; Edmund Rochester, who, only after being blinded in a sacrificial act, sees that he cannot possess Jane Eyre or anyone else. And of course the theme of seeing but not seeing is nobly portrayed in King Lear. The Duke of Gloucester, literally blinded, comes to see that his true son has always been with him. In a final scene, Lear, suddenly enlightened, says that he and Cordelia will be God’s spies in prison. That motif of inversion—the blind who have a clarity not granted to those who use their outer eyes—is also a theme in biblical literature. When the disciples asked Jesus why he spoke in parables, he replied by quoting the prophet Isaiah. Commissioned in a dramatic confrontation in the temple, Isaiah told the people, “Hear indeed, but understand not; see indeed, but perceive not.” Jesus explained that he spoke in parables because the crowds saw his wonderworks but did not recognize them as signs of his divinity. <> Several of the Jesus stories concern his healing of blind people. Most commonly the blind are lumped together in a class of disabled—in King James’s version, “the lame, the halt, and the blind”—all of whom come to Jesus and are healed. Occasionally, one or two of these people are featured in separate narratives. The story of blind Bartimaeus became important to me in 1994, the year I decided to change my life—quit my job, become confirmed as an Episcopalian, move seventy miles away to attend seminary. Mike, a friend and colleague at the college where I worked was using Thomas Boomershine’s book Story Journey in one of his classes. The book focuses on the great biblical narratives and encourages readers to put themselves into the stories. Mike invited me to sit in on the class if I wanted to. Since nothing makes me feel older than being in a classroom full of students in their late teens and early twenties, I declined to attend class. However, I completed the writing assignments, and to Mike, whom I trusted, I told the truth. Bartimaeus, being blind, joined the ranks of beggars outside the city, where those considered impure because of their physical condition or occupation lived. His city happened to be Jericho, famous for the walls which came tumblin’ down. Maybe it’s all literally true. Maybe the writer is trying to make a point. Here’s Jesus, leaving a city known for a great victory, accomplished through miracle. Bartimaeus, hearing that Jesus is passing by, cries out, “Have mercy on me, Son of David.” The text says that many told Bartimaeus to be quiet, but he just cried out again, louder this time, “Son of David, have mercy.” Being quiet isn’t a good way to get attention, and Bartimaeus wanted attention. His strategy worked; Jesus stopped, and asked the crowd to bring the man to him. (Why, I wonder? Wouldn’t it have been easier for Jesus to walk over to Bartimaeus? Am I supposed to learn something here about effort and desire?) One of the things I love about Jesus is that he takes nothing for granted. A blind man has cried out for mercy, and Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus knows that the obvious answer isn’t always the answer. Or maybe he just wants the man to speak truly what he wanted most. I recently read Elizabeth Canham’s book Heart Whispers. She poses in it a question I can’t get away from: what kind of life does the heart want? Bartimaeus knows what he wants: “Lord, that I might receive my sight.” “Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Meditating on that narrative, I wrote that spring: I am Bartimaeus, sitting by the roadside as usual, begging for attention, That sounds melodramatic, histrionic, but it is my bone-hard, bone-deep truth. Seven years later, the words still seem histrionic to me. I reread the essay with pre-Baroque music playing in the background, cheering me on. In three brief pages, I trace my grievances as a woman in a patriarchal Christian culture. I felt that as a single, childless woman, I was doubly marginalized in a world that glorified marriage and motherhood. I was furious at the exclusion of women from public, visible ministries, ranging from preaching to serving on important committees—I called us cookie-makers and diaper-changers. I lamented the lack of women role-models and the appropriation of women’s achievements by men. Because I am a woman interested in theology, I felt and termed myself a freak, a cosmic joke. Finally, I explained my decision to leave fundamentalism and my criteria for choosing a seminary. It’s clear that I was deeply wounded—the anger still sizzles off the page. I remember a therapist I worked with, who, when I began spouting about how angry I was, told me he didn’t care about the anger. “What’s underneath?” he asked. “Fear? Hurt?” Both were clearly part of my experience of being a woman in fundamentalism. The idea of leaving the safe world I knew was exhilarating, yes, but frightening. And the hurts, as I documented them, were recurrent. The piece concludes with a reference to quilting as a metaphor for life. I am now ripping out the stitches, changing the arrangement of the pattern. It is tedious work. It will require at least two years, or my whole life. I have no clear picture of what my quilt should or will look like. I am working blindly, intuitively, waiting for light. I have heard Jesus is walking down this road toward me as I sit, not with a tin cup waiting for a handout but with a piece bag of fabric scraps, creating.
Judy A. Johnson is a freelance writer and editor of educational materials. Her work has appeared in Mars Hill Review, Stone River Review, and is forthcoming in Karamu. She is an Episcopal laywoman. Her first book, A Week to Pray About It, will be published in May 2006 by Cowley Publications.
© Judy A. Johnson. All rights reserved.
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