The Angst of Almost Seeing

I missed the 1950s in New York City by a quarter century and a considerable cultural distance from my Bible Belt existence. Still, my recent reading has given me a sense of Gotham's pent-up frustrations, the collective tension of millions of dreams deferred.

Civic planner Robert Moses takes broadsides in both Robert Caro's biography The Power Broker and in an anthology of articles from the decade in the New Yorker magazine. The theme from Friends could be playing 40 years in advance as crowded masses mutter that no one told them life was going to be this way. The vision that sustained through some portion of Depression and war was more compelling than the reality they are experiencing as mass prosperity creates mass congestion and competition.

Even the glass occludes and frustrates. Grouses one writer in "The Lesson of the Master" "A transparent glass roof in New York is a drawing-board dream; even a daily hosing down of the canopy would not guarantee a transparent surface a few hours later – and what looks dirtier than even slightly soiled glass?" What transparency we have, he chafes, makes the smudges and distortions more obvious. Why bother?

Jesus, of course, understood the angst of almost well before New York City was overbuilt. Possibility hangs in the air as He idealizes in Matthew 6:22 (New King James Version), "The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light." He simultaneously foresees the interference with perfect translucence.  The Ophthalmologist of the Soul follows with commiseration in Matthew 6:23 (New King James Version), "but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" What is darker than that which lets in just enough light to show us how bright things could have been?

Finishing Matthew 6 with the prescription that we don't see because we use what sight we have to seek after the wrong things, Jesus stands fast with what the New Yorker author dismisses as "the drawing-board dream." His is the drawing board. His is the design of the intricacies of our eyes, and of the mind which quests behind the ocular organ. Not only did He invoke the drawing board design of what your heart and my heart longs for as well as the lenses through which we continue to seek it, His is the capacity to guarantee a transparent surface. What the most conscientious window washer or lens grinder cannot actuate, He can. No matter how many times we have seen today's familiar, not-quite environment through all the smudges or spidering cracks we bring to the experience, His Matthew 6:22 Light can still reach our shrouded souls.


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