It may be tempting, when seeing this title on a blind person’s blog, to think that this post will be about something inspirational based on life as a blind person. Blindness gives us great opportunities to live by faith since we cannot see, right?
Certainly this is a great idea; but it is a misinterpretation of 2 Cor. 5:7. I looked up the verse recently because I was disturbed by the phrase and its significations for me as a blind person. I found that the real implications were deeply comforting for me.
Paul is speaking in the surrounding context about putting our hope in what is eternal. When he speaks about living by faith and not by sight, he refers to the fact that what we can see (in a figurative sense) may be bleak and hopeless. Our life’s circumstances may give very little reason for hope of glory or joy; but the promise of life with Christ is our hope of joy everlasting.
This text has nothing to do with blindness despite the use of the word “sight”. In the disability community there is loud objection to the use of metaphorical sight-language because of these very misinterpretations. Some people who are blind would be in favor of rewriting the verse in a way that eliminates the visual language altogether.
I am not. Metaphors are things that make our language rich. The verse actually includes two “ableist” metaphors: walking and sight. As a person who is blind, the sight does not offend me. I could say that “we move as people who live by faith…” but I must confess that moving changes the theology profoundly.
Most people do not relate to me as a person who has any other difficulty in life besides seeing. I have lived for some time with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, both of which cause intermittent difficulty with my knees and hips. To think of life’s journey in terms of walking is a much more profound thing for me than to think of it in terms of moving. When I walk, I sometimes do it with ease and sometimes do it with great difficulty. In fact, sometimes I need to ask my husband for help or pay extra attention to how I stand so that I do not fall. When I am moving, I may be riding passively while someone else is driving a car. There is no effort on my part at all and I may not think at all about my passage through space. In fact, I am likely to fall asleep on the way! For me, the idea of moving is the most irresponsible analogy I could use for my spiritual journey. I certainly understand why my wheelchair-using friends would not share this view; but they are not passive about their movement. Perhaps we need the verse to say “walking and moving”.
I certainly don’t have negative feelings toward the original writers. The documents that make up our Bible were, honestly, written by able-bodied people for other able-bodied people. I don’t need to say that with anger. It is a historical obswervation about the early church. As a member of the clergy in the current-day church, my responsibility is to help people to wrestle with how to read for spiritual formation in a way that connects what was said and likely meant in that time with how we live today.
I hope I am helping to untangle some things. At the least, I hope you might be curious and crack open your favorite translation to 2 Cor. 5. It’s a wonderful chapter, and faith not by sight is just one of its treasures.
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I agree… to me the walking represents effort on my part to keep moving forward through life’s struggles, whatever they may be and however difficult they may be. The hope and faith of what’s on the other side is what gives me the strength to press on.