For reasons that I cannot fully understand, I sometimes find myself claimed by the maxim of Charles De Gaulle: maximize the inevitable. A case in point: I sometimes feel that a minor disability of mine has been a kind of blessing, my defective color perception, generally called color-blindness.
Typically, I don’t see a range of red-green colors. So, of course, I’m always very, very, very careful approaching traffic lights (I do see red and green well enough to pass my driver’s exam every time!). But, notwithstanding all the liabilities, I believe that over the years, by the Grace of God, I have been able to maximize this inevitable, sometimes in a way that’s given me an edge.
It all surfaced in the eleventh grade, when I first consciously discovered my condition. In a health class, all of us were given those flip booklets with the numbers immersed in variegated colors. I looked through mine, astounded. Many of the pages in my booklet had no numbers! All my classmates gathered around me. The teacher came over to check whether I had somehow received a defective booklet. No, we all then realized, I was – in some sense – color blind! For a few moments back then in my classroom, I had become a kind of teenage celebrity.
That experience bequeathed to me a life-maxim, simplistic as it may sound, which I treasure to this day: my own vision of the world, compared to most others’, is markedly limited. “See those lovely red roses,” my wife once excitedly said to me, when we were new to each other, as we were driving along a country road. “What roses?” I asked.
Are you ready for this, then? I would like to think that, at least on some occasions, my awareness of my own color-blindness, has made me a better theologian. It has prompted me to be aware that what I typically see spiritually, even when I’m having a good day, is much less than what many other people typically can see every day.
That’s why, I’m sure, I’ve clung over the years so gratefully, even so desperately, to the witness of those who, in my view, have had eyes to see what’s real much more clearly than I’ve been able to see, visionaries like my sixth-grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Popper, or my first pastoral supervisor, the Rev. Dr. Henry E. Horn.
That’s why, too, I’ve been so deeply interested for so long in learning from great thinkers, past and present, theologians and practitioners like St. Augustine and St. Francis, Luther and Calvin, Soren Kierkegaard and John Muir, Henry David Thoreau and Vincent Van Gogh, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Paul Tillich. They all, and many others like them, have helped me to see more clearly what’s really real in this life.
I invite you to claim or reclaim this insight for yourself. You don’t always have to rely on your own vision alone, especially when it comes to matters of faith. See through the eyes of others whom you trust, whenever you can. Join me, in this respect, in maximizing the inevitable.*
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*If you want to follow up on these matters, check out my intellectual autobiography, “Ecology, Justice, Liturgy,” in Theologians in Their Own Words, Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M. Moritz, and Ted Peters, eds. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press), 217-232.
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