In a prior post (“Seeing with an Injured Eye”) I told of pondering my blind spots after an eye injury created flashes and floaters my brain needed to learn how to filter out. As I wrote, it didn’t occur to me to ponder the reverse–what about if we couldn’t stop seeing everything in front of us?

That thought hit me when pondering eyesight factors, literal and symbolic, with a friend who had also just experienced a vitreous detachment. I had been focusing on the realization that if brains filter out symptoms of such eye damage, this means we see only in part, only what our brain lets through its filters.

But then I was reminded that this ability of the brain to filter is also nearly miraculous, a healing power indeed. Any of us who have permanent visual disturbances know how challenging they can be. I don’t fully know what some sufferers experience, but I do know that it was a blessed relief when my brain mostly did away with my conscious awareness of floaters and flashes. Until then, particularly as my eyes first adjusted to them, there were times I found them nearly unbearable as they blocked my easy access to the visual world, dancing ever more prominently across the landscape the more I tried to ignore them.

Once when as a young seminarian I presented a colloquium paper, a professor asked if I saw any value in ability to be in denial. Given that my paper highlighted the power of openness, I saw little in denial to appreciate.

Maybe his question was more important than I could acknowledge back then. Imagine being confronted endlessly with raw reality, unfiltered, unsimplified, its floaters and flashes insisting on being seen no matter how this overwhelmed us.

Imagine never being able to deny our mortality, our vulnerability to being hurt or worse, emotionally or even physically, at any given moment. Imagine never been able to forget, even for brief moments of respite, that the same is  true for our loved ones and our happiness hangs every second by a thread.

Imagine remembering with each breath and bite that the poisonous byproducts of what we make and eat and consume are everywhere. Imagine constant awareness that the judgments and criticisms of others we often luxuriate in are not a one-way street. A grandchild once told me, “PawPaw, you would not want to be inside my brain; it’s scary in there.” Imagine if we all were exposed all the time to each other’s “scary in there.”

Or imagine if we could look straight at God’s face. According to Exodus 33, when Moses pleads with God to “Show me your glory,” God speaks of allowing God’s goodness, name, graciousness, and mercy to be shown and proclaimed but not God’s face, “which you cannot see and live.” It’s not that God is insensitive to the human longing to see glory; God promises to hide Moses in the cleft of a rock under protection of the divine hand while passing by, “then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.” Blind spots, then, are perhaps even God’s hand protecting us from seeing God’s face while allowing us, through the floaters and flashes, a glimpse of God’s back.

So I want to be regularly aware of how often my brain creates blind spots by editing out reality. I also want regularly to be grateful not to have to handle every moment of every day the unfiltered actualities whose glory could even kill me and us.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which publishes many of his Kingsview & Co posts.