Fiat lux

Along with the remaining 3% of 2001 babies, I have what is colloquially known as a lazy eye. When my eyes are out of focus, it appears as though I am looking at two things at once, but I am not. When my eyes are out of focus, I see only out of my dominant eye.  Only, the dominant eye fluctuates, and moment by moment, my view of the world is recast. 

I blink, and I see another angle. What was peripheral becomes central. This isn’t the best for reading or meeting people.  Frankly, it has been the culprit of innumerable less-than-fluid interactions that litter my childhood. 

However, in this particular wrinkle of history, human technology has so subdued nature such that modern medicine has granted me a liminally efficacious surgery and bifocals with a prism to correct this congenital defect. 

Thus, I am no longer so cognizant of what it’s like to have an oscillating aspect of the world. Thus, in virtue of my presently stable vision, I am free to read unhindered by the constant reframing, symptomatic of amblyopia. Or rather, I am free to be vexed by the content of my reading rather than the operation of my reading.

So it happens that, at the behest of one of BC’s greats, Professor Kreeft, I was nettled upon reading a little book by Fr.. Jean Pierre de Caussade, called “Abandonment to Divine Providence.” Stringing together lay words, indeed simple words intelligible to most, Fr. de Caussade weaves a tapestry unintelligible to me. The image stitched thereof consists in the virtue of the fiat and the evaluation of this act of faith as the surest and shortest path to communion with God.  

The profundity of this tapestry, which I received so unfavorably, lies in his exhortation to receive favorably your present moment as the divinely conceived map to your sanctification (n.b. that is my crude gloss undue his esteemed work). That is to say, the surest and shortest path to communion with Him, which admits the notion of rest from your restlessness, lies in the dry injunction to “do what you are doing… [and] suffer what you are suffering”

Upon my first reading of this exhortation, I was peeved most by the universal ascription of its merits. Is this really so? Ought even I really dismiss all appearances of accident and qualm, which colors my present? 

To this, Fr. Jean is patently clear: “All the perfection of the saints consists in their fidelity to the order of God; therefore we must refuse nothing, seek nothing, but accept all from His hand… there is no special way which can be called the most perfect…the most perfect in general is fidelity to the order of God… if souls seriously aspiring to perfection understood this, and knew how direct their path, they would be spared much difficulty.” 

As I understand it, Fr. Jean is so stirred to write by his conviction that for all induced to seek God, the surest and shortest path, least hindered by difficulty, consists in embracing what is given you in the present moment, even when it veils itself as trite or antagonistic.

Guesstimating that my sufferings are not so unique, I will ascribe to the large majority, my experience of the present moment: knotted, tinted by old wounds, and altogether dulled, especially in light of the diminution of light during this annual procession from summer to winter. 

That is to say we are each attended by “crosses sent by Providence”—mail I am not so keen to track, not to mention receive, encased by all that is perceived as “accidents, disappointments, misfortunes, contradictions, [all that appears] untimely.”

To my reader, who by all probability, does not suffer from amblyopia, the symptoms of amblyopia furnish a constant reframing of your perception of the world.  

Yet I can’t help but wonder if this congenital defect, so called, often viewed as something to treat, figures as a grace. That is to say, given an oscillatory view of the world, my evaluation of my view of the world as such has less stock. 

It isn’t fixed. It is unreliable. Although it may be biologically advantageous to have a fixed aspect from which you gaze at the world, the constant reminder of the tenuous nature of my aspect approximates a reminder to chasten myself to something greater.  

That is, it affords me the opportunity to second-guess my perception, which in sin and dullness of intellect, is so quick to deem my present occupations as inopportune and resentful.

Perhaps the prism in my glasses, which tunes my vision to see with greater definition, all that is to be seen, has led me to forget that all that is to be seen for me is not all that is to be seen. Perhaps what is peripheral to me, which might’ve been central in the blink of an eye, is indeed more central; and, inevitably, “on the last day He will say, fiat lux, and then shall be revealed the treasures of that abyss of peace and contentment with God which each action, each cross conceals,” whereof everything that poses itself a question to me will become a new song, will be drawn back into focus by Him Who restrains not His mercies for us, Who turns our mourning into dancing (J.P. de Caussade, Psalm 40, Psalm 30).