They say that if an adult has been blind their entire life and has their sight restored as an adult, they can’t “see” an object until they have felt it, after which they can visualise it. Presumably because they have relied on other sensory input their entire life and they have to learn to use their eyes in the same way they used to use their hands—they have to learn to connect what their hands “saw” with what their eyes are now seeing.
Somewhere in this is a wisp of what I am looking for. We are born into and develop in a sensory-based world: we rely on, depend, and accept as “real” what we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. But the Bible says the righteous walk by “faith” and not by “sight”, rather than by hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. So perhaps becoming strong in faith is a spiritual equivalent of an adult with their sight restored learning how to see with their eyes instead of with their hands.
C.S. Lewis points out that when the Bible speaks about a resurrected Christ suddenly appearing to His disciples in the upper room, people tend to think of Him being a ghost and kind of misty with less substance than the ordinary human. Some believed He walked through the door to appear in the room, but the Bible doesn’t say that. Yet Lewis points out that this makes no sense simply in terms of what we know about the world: Jesus walked through a door; less corporeal things do not tend to walk through more corporeal things. We walk through mist, the mist doesn’t drift through us. Lewis points out if Jesus walked through the door, the door would have had less substance to the risen Christ, that the spiritual is a more real reality than our physical realm.
I want to learn to have more confidence in the spiritual realm than I do in the physical. To know and believe that when I call on God, He is fully capable of answering me even if He doesn’t have a physical body. Does this make sense?
