Article October 31, 1983 Issue

To those who don't wear glasses (and those who do)

NATHAN A. TALBOT

The Christian Scientist who wears glasses does not accept this material aid as a genuine solution to impaired vision. Frankly, he sees it as a compromise. He defines it as a compromise because he understands that the real need is for spiritual healing; and he knows the importance of never drifting into a comfortable dependency on matter to normalize his sense of vision.

But wait a minute. What about the Christian Scientist who doesn't wear glasses? How much is he depending on matter—on a pair of corporeal organs—to give him vision? It's possible he may be accepting a subtle or unconscious dependency on matter that is fundamentally similar to the kind his glasses-wearing friends need to guard against. Any elementary or continuing or deepening dependency on matter goes against the grain of our growing trust in Spirit.

If we are relying only on matter for vision, we've accepted far too much limitation. Even a pair of eyes rated by an optometrist as twenty-twenty sees relatively little. Natural scientists speculate that the human eye takes in only about 5 or 10 percent of what it "sees." The eye can respond only to a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus a whole universe of color exists that we are unaware of. How many have ever seen an infrared rose or an ultraviolet violet? Indeed, if an object does not radiate light in the part of the light spectrum we can see, it is invisible to the unaided eye. The night sky, for example, is filled with brilliant objects that we can't see because they are radiating in infrared, ultraviolet, or X-ray. What a different universe we would see if the eyes were not so limited! People accept twenty-twenty vision as satisfactory—and yet, from a more demanding standard, this "normal sight" could be said to be extremely restricted.

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