Twenty years ago, I underwent surgery on my sinuses and the day after the operation, the surgeon called to ask how I was doing. I told him my nose and breathing were just fine, but my left eye was killing me. His reply was that this made sense because, unfortunately during the surgery, he had accidentally punched through the thinnest place of the bone between the sinus cavity and the eye socket, and when he did, not only had he fractured the bone, but he’d damaged the muscles of my left eye, the result being that even after an eye surgery a few months later, my sight was affected permanently with significant double vision whenever I look either up or to the left.
What followed post-surgery was a series of eye exams and therapies. Lenses were shifted and dials were turned, as efforts were made to improve my compromised vision.
Double vision is a helpful metaphor. We strive to see the world and one another through charitable eyes, through God’s eyes, eyes of self-giving love, but our very human way of seeing things exclusively from our own point of view often misaligns our vision, both blurring how we see ourselves and distorting how we ought to see others, as well as the world around us. Double vision results. A lack of clarity and perspective.
Let’s consider shifting the lens and turning the dials, with three separate words that appear in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6, verse 22:
The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is in single focus, pure and sound, your whole body will be well-lighted.
Let’s look at the three words. First, single, as in “single-focused.” Second, the word “pure”; and third, the word, “sound.” Single. Pure. And sound. Sound eyes.
First, single. These are words spoken by Jesus here in the Gospel. What does Jesus mean when he uses the word single or single-focus. This gospel was originally written in Greek and the Greek word here for ‘single’ translates as ‘generous.’ It appears what Jesus is saying is that it’s a generous eye which produces light, leading to a brighter, more joyful quality of life. So practically-speaking, how do we do this? How do we develop generous eyes?
Generous Eyes
Think back for a moment to a disagreement that’s embroiled you recently or perhaps even one that you can foresee rising ahead.
Social psychologist Anatol Rapaport had a versatile mind. He worked in the fields of mathematics, psychology, game theory, and extensively in peace and conflict studies, and in his work, he developed something now called Rapoport’s Rules. Three rules on how to disagree well. Here they are:
Rule #1: Before disagreeing, you must first understand and be able to re- express your opponent’s position so clearly, so vividly, so fairly and with such understanding of its nuance, its merits, and its strengths that, when you finish expressing it back to your opponent, he or she is compelled to say: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it just that way.”
Rule # 2: List any points of agreement you have with your opponent; and
Rule #3: Express to your opponent anything you’ve learned from them about the subject matter you disagree about.
Then and only then, when you’ve done all three, are you permitted to rebut, criticize, or engage with you opponent’s position.
Sounds great, but how are we going to get everyone to do that? Well, we’re not, but it’s incumbent on those who hold themselves to a “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” standard to lead the way. Let’s not just burn down each other’s straw-men. We need to work now to develop generous eyes.
Pure Eyes
Pure Eyes. How do we maintain clear, pure and undistracted eyes in this modern age, in face of the many distractions and diversions before us? How do we make sure our attention is given to things that represent time well spent with all that swirls around us?
Tristan Harris has been called the conscience of silicon valley and his message to all of us is this: we need to spend more time thinking about how we spend our time. Tristan, a Stanford grad, built and sold his startup company to Google at age 26, and Google was so impressed with him that they hired him to become one of their company’s software design ethicists. However, after seeing what the company did up close, Tristan left, uncomfortable with Google’s business model which measured success by the metric of how much of their user’s time on app and on site they could capture, hold, then increase, month by month, and year by year.
When Tristan left, he founded a new company called Time-Well Spent, a foundation which encourages, funds and mobilizes support for tech designers to build software around the core value of helping us spend our time better.
Tristan cites studies that show the average smartphone user spends more than four hours per day on their device, and that we check our phones on an average of 150 times per day. And while he acknowledges our eyes and attention are our own responsibility, he also wants us to know there are thousands of engineers behind our screens whose job it is every day to fine-tune their algorithms to keep our eyes down, glued to our devices more and more each business quarter.
I’ve recently tried one of Tristan’s many tips to combat their efforts. It’s quite simple. I turned my phone’s color off. You can set your phone to grayscale. It strips out its invisibly addictive color rewards, such that it holds just a little bit less luster and psychological hold on your nervous system, while, not so subtly reminding you, that what you see all around you when we look up, not down, is not only more important, but more real, more colorful and ultimately the place where you’ll find a more well- lit and joyful life.
Perhaps as an easy start to regain less distracted, purer, clearer eyes, try it and begin to treat what you give our attention to each moment of each day as something sacred.
Sound Eyes
Sound eyes. Just what might that mean? Let’s turn the dials a bit more and focus our vision with a quick test. A pop quiz. Ready?
- Where does the majority of the world population live?
- Low-income countries
- Middle-income countries
- High-income countries
- In the last 20 yrs the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has?
- Almost doubled
- Remained more or less the same
- Almost halved
- How did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster change over the last 100 years?
- More than doubled
- Remained about the same
- Decreased to less than half
- How many people in the world have some access to electricity?
- 20%
- 50%
- 80%
- How many of the world’s 1-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease
- 20%
- 50%
- 80%
Ok, here are the answers:
- B— most of the world lives in middle income countries.
- C— extreme poverty’s been cut in half in just 20 years.
- C— natural disaster deaths have decreased by half in the last 100 years.
- C— 80% of the world has electricity.
- C— 80% of the world’s 1 year old’s have been immunized.
If you did well, congratulations. If you did badly, you’re in good company. Thousands of people across the globe have taken this quiz and most do terribly. In fact, according to the late Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness, even experts in global development rarely score better than a chimpanzee would by choosing randomly.
When we think about what’s going on in the world, we often jump to thoughts of war, violence, shootings, pandemics, natural disaster and corruption, believing not only that everything’s bad, but getting worse year after year. While in reality, almost all of the good things one might use to measure human progress and human flourishing— life expectancy, immunization rates, literacy, access to education for girls, number of people living under democracy, access to electricity and safe drinking water— all of these things are going up, especially in the last forty years. At the same time, almost all of the bad things one might use to measure human suffering— extreme poverty, infant mortality, deaths from disaster, hunger, famine, war, violence, pollution, ozone depletion, nuclear arms— are going down. Stephen Pinker makes this case persuasively in his book, Enlightenment Now.
As Pinker says, yes, we have a long way to go and we could go over a long and accurate list of things that are going wrong in the world— there’s still way too much preventable suffering that continues to go on— but developing sound, rational and reasonable eyes helps us counter the prevailing narrative that everything is spiraling downward and out of control, and keeps getting worse.
You might counter these notions, responding that, well, isn’t it good to be a little pessimistic? Wouldn’t God wants us to be on guard against being satisfied with the world as it is. Perhaps, but I think God’s direction for us to cultivate sound eyes suggests that its better simply to be accurate. To be aware of suffering, injustice and crises where they occur, but also to be aware of what is happening to reduce them, so we can focus our energies precisely on those things.
Likewise, its God-honoring to cultivate sound and rational eyes, not just about the world, but about our own lives, as well, and part of developing sound and reasoning eyes about ourselves is to build a bulwark against our very human proclivity for what psychologists call hedonistic adaptation.
Have you ever noticed that rather than experiencing a durable feeling of satisfaction from the many things and blessings we receive, we often quickly begin taking them for granted and simply begin looking for the next thing. The next something, even bigger and better on the horizon.
Cognitive behavioral counselors suggest we combat this very human tendency toward hedonistic adaptation, by using something that, at first glance is counter-intuitive for a counselor to suggest, something called negative visualization. That is, they suggest we spend brief moments from time to time, imagining that we’ve lost the very things we value most— our family, our health, our freedom, our jobs. And while these same counselors are quick to warn against ruminating long on these ideas, they suggest that we keep a little flicker of these visualizations in our minds briefly, perhaps a few times a week.
An example: You find yourself walking pleasantly along side a friend or close family member. Think, just briefly, just in a flickering way, about a future time when you may not have the ability to walk or be with the person you’re with, and just briefly consider how that’s likely to make you feel, then consider how, in that future moment, what you’d give to be on this very walk, with this very person. Sound eyes, generous eyes, pure and undistracted eyes, recognize such blessings and recognize the light they shed on our lives.
Clarity of Vision
A visit to the eye doctor’s no fun. There’s the puff of air into your eye. There’s the little letters and all the questions about which one’s clearer— one or two; one or two. Then there’s that other test with the equipment pushed up to your eyes, with one figure— a number or a letter— in your field of vision, up and to the left, and the same figure in your field of vision down and to the right, and the doctor asking you to speak up when the two figures merge into one. Then the dials start turning, there’s a moment of double vision, then slowly, the two come together as one.
I think that’s the very picture God intends for us as we follow these, Christ’s instructions, more and more each day— our eyes becoming more generous, our attention becoming more pure, and our outlook becoming more sound, until our vision becomes not just more like Christ’s vision, but merges into Christ’s vision, a singled focused thing, one from which we hear emerge God’s voice saying to us quietly, now you see what I see.