Seeing by Faith: Using our “Magic Eye”

In all the nearly 900 blog posts I have made to this point, only one has mentioned bees: “The Plight of the Bumblebee” posted on 7/20/14. But I now know much more about bees as recently I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2001) and watched the 2008 movie based on that novel.

More than What the Eye Can See

Sue Monk Kidd (b. 1948) is an engaging writer. Her The Invention of Wings (2014) is on my list of the “top ten” best novels I have read this century. But her earlier novel was also a delightful and thought-provoking read.

The central character in The Secret Life of Bees is Lily, who turns 14 early in the book. She is splendidly played by Dakota Fanning in the movie, which also stars Queen Latifah as August Boatwright, the second main character in the book/movie.

About halfway through the book, Lily reflects on what August has said to her about “spiritual” things, and she thinks,

maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn’t know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine (p. 176).

Perhaps things that the eye can see—things that can be thoroughly investigated by science—is all that can be taught in public schools. But how unfortunate is any child whose education is limited to only what the eye can see!

Seeing with One’s “Magic Eye”

Most of you are probably familiar with “magic eye” pictures. Their technical name is autostereograms.

Only 30 years ago, in 1991, a computer programmer and an artist created the first color random-dot autostereograms, later marketed as Magic Eye. I was fascinated with them when I first saw them in the 1990s and several times used them as sermon illustrations.

I was somewhat surprised when I discovered that the “magic eye” pictures could be seen on a computer screen as well as when printed on paper. So look at the image below. On the surface, it seems to be only a random-colored, meaningless picture.

But now use your “magic eye” and look for the depth in the picture. Do you see the 3-D picture? Believe me, there is really a meaningful image there, and I assume that most of you can see it. 

It is only an illustration or an analogy, so there are limitations to the explanation, but similar to seeing a magic eye picture, faith is seeing the “depth” of reality rather than just “carbon and oxygen and mineral.”

What Is Essential is Invisible to the Eye

Moving beyond what we actually can see with our eyes if we look at a magic eye picture in the right way, I am thoroughly convinced that by faith we can “see” what is not visible to our physical eyes.

I have many “top ten” lists, and one is a list of my favorite quotes, which includes these words from The Little Prince (1943), written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In that delightful story, the little prince declares, 

I have always felt a bit sorry for people who were unable to see the 3-D objects in magic eye pictures. But that inability is trivial to the inability to see the “depth” of existence, the essential meaning of life that is invisible to the physical eye, i.e., to science alone.

Most people, though, who are open to suggestions about how to look at magic eye pictures do come to see what is really visible there.

Similarly, for those who are open to learning what kind of world we are actually living in, as Lily was, the “magic eye” of faith makes it possible to see the wonderful splendor of reality that is invisible to our physical eyes.

How marvelous is the magic eye of faith!

The Amazing Grimké Sisters

February each year is designated as Black History Month here in the U.S. For my contribution to this year’s emphasis on Black history, this article is mainly about two white women who were significantly involved in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in the United States.

In spite of long knowing about and being appreciative of other women abolitionists, such as Lucinda Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for some reason I had never known about Sarah and Angelina Grimké until fairly recently.

Last November I read The Invention of Wings (2014), Sue Monk Kidd’s wonderful historical novel about the Grimké sisters. I was both greatly informed and impressed.

Sarah Grimké was born in 1792 in Charleston, South Carolina, and her little sister Angelina was born in 1805. In the 1830s they became the first female antislavery pioneers and activists in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

Charleston, S.C., was founded in 1670 as Charles Town in honor of England’s King Charles II. By 1690 it was the fifth-largest city in North America. Charleston, as it was called after 1783, became the nation’s slave trade capital, the place where 40% of slaves brought from Africa first landed. The city was built on slave labor and thrived under a slave economy for nearly 200 years.

Soon after Lincoln was elected President, in December 1860 South Carolina was the first state to secede. The Civil War, then, began on April 12, 1861, when troops in Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, which was on an island at the entrance of Charleston Harbor.

Growing up in Charleston, the Grimké sisters certainly knew about slavery firsthand. Their father, a lawyer, politician, and judge, was also a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of slaves.

Kidd’s book begins with a chapter about Handful, the slave girl who is given as a personal slave to Sarah on her eleventh birthday—and the book is as much the story of the fictional Handful and her mother as it is about the historical Grimké sisters.

In a significant subplot of the novel, the life of Handful’s mother becomes entangled with that of a black man with the improbable name of Denmark Vesey—a historical figure I was also glad to learn about.

Vesey won a lottery in 1799 when he was 32. He used some of that money to purchase his freedom—but he also wanted to help slaves in Charleston, and elsewhere, obtain their freedom. To that end he began to draw up plans for a slave revolt.

Vesey’s plot, though, was thwarted, the revolt crushed, and he was executed in July 1822. (Remarkably, in 2014 a monument to Vesey, which you see part of in the picture, was placed in a Charleston city park.) 

Having seen the evils of slavery even in their own home, Sarah and then Angelina a few years later moved north to escape it. The Grimké sisters became Quakers and increasingly became involved in the fight against slavery in Philadelphia and surrounding areas.

Other abolitionists could give stirring speeches about the need to abolish slavery, but the Grimké sisters from personal knowledge could testify to slavery’s evil impact on human lives. Through most of the 1830s they spoke in many public meetings, pleading for the abolition of slavery as well as for women’s rights—the first single women in the nation to do so widely.

The amazing Grimké sisters took very seriously the words a Quaker man spoke to Sarah when they first met: “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”