the Church as deaf and blind // part one

This may be an entirely random post, or it could be a moment of truth, you decide. As I was driving home from rehearsal last night, Helen Keller popped into my head for some reason of which I am entirely unaware. In any case, I began to process her life and think about what it would have been like to not be able to see or hear.

Until last night, I’m not sure I had ever sat long enough to really think or understand what that must have been like for her and to tell you the truth it is a very difficult thing to do to imagine yourself with no ability to communicate, and yet someone is trying to communicate concepts to you. Her teacher could not tell her. This is water. Nor could she show her what water is. She just had to pour water over her hand and spell it out over and over and over again until finally something clicked in the child’s head. Put yourself there for a minute. No ability to communicate, this is so and so, it is a basic element of life. Words really don’t even make sense. How do you figure out how to tell someone what that is when they don’t even get the concept of “that has a name.”

Crazy to think about.

So then I started thinking about the church. I wondered if the church is a lot like Helen Keller in her early years, deaf and blind, and no understanding of the concepts being communicated to her. The world is saying, this is what we feel, and we won’t hope, and through some decision, our ears are closed and our eyes are shut to their cries for help. They are saying, we struggle with “this” and the response they hear from the church is “we don’t know what ‘this’ is, we can’t help.” Except instead of having a disease that caused our blindness and deafness, we created it (or maybe it is a disease).

I don’t know. I’m not sure its the best analogy, and I haven’t completely fleshed it out yet, but that was my thought process last night.