Not Being like God

Genesis 3, John 1, Genesis 1, Acts 5, assorted verses from the Gospels, Psalm 23

Preached at Tigard Community Friends Church

September 29, 2019

            Since I retired from paid employment, people have asked me how I’m spending my time. This is an embarrassing question to answer, since, after 37 years of grad school and working, I’m doing just whatever I feel like doing each day. I don’t usually feel very productive, though recently my spouse and I dug around 80 holes in order to plant shrubs, trees, roses, perennials. We unearthed rocks that were a foot across, and left some buried that were larger. Sometimes it’s easier to rethink where the plant goes.  Some of the holes were nearly pure gravelly rock. So it’s been fun. I could say I’m productively working to help stabilize the climate, if I wanted to try to impress myself, but really I just wanted plants around me to make me happy.

This relates to what I’m learning about my relationship with God in these days of unpaidness. I’m learning what it means to simply be human with God and with other people. I’m learning that my being human is enough for God. And I’m recognizing that a lot of what drove me through my working life as a university professor and administrator was the desire to be a little more than simply human.

For one thing, I wanted to be tougher than the rest. So I went back to teach an hour after a root canal. I taught on crutches two days after knee surgery. I attended a facilities committee meeting the afternoon of the day my dad died.  I wanted to be and to be seen as ultra committed, reliable, and tough.

I also wanted to be in charge. I liked the classroom where I wrote the syllabus and ran the agenda for each day. I also liked the challenge of managing the human beings in my classes toward learning and growing. I created open space for my students in the classes, but it was my open space. I didn’t relish the idea of co-teaching a class, with the constant negotiation of what to do each day.

I wanted to be recognized as a leader by my peers and my boss. I could be bought with promises of access to leadership opportunities. I was successful in getting the leadership openings I wanted until one time when I was spectacularly unsuccessful and some of my colleagues thought I should leave and go work elsewhere. I was devastated and resentful and angry. It was the death of a dream, only I went on living.

Now, when I look back, I still feel the sting, and I know it was an actual death for me. I did go on to be general superintendent of NWYM, but I think I would have found the job of general superintendent unbearable if I hadn’t already had my ambition and some of my need for approval snuffed out. Since leaving that superintendent work, I am finding that my spiritual task now is to learn how to be simply human.

I recently read Jacques Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity and William Stringfellow’s Instead of Death, both books from decades ago that I find enormously relevant to where I see myself and where I see my co-travelers in our local and global cultures. I just mention these, not because I will be quoting them a lot, but because their analyses underlie my thinking to some extent, so if you’re interested, you can read them for yourselves.

I want to take us back to the Garden of Eden, and the temptation scene (Genesis 3). The setup is this: God has created the whole earth and set the father and mother of humanity in a garden where all their needs are met. There are also two miraculous trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, or, as it turns out, the Tree of Death.  God sets them free to eat anything in the garden EXCEPT the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God says, “In the day you eat of it, you will surely die.” So, the tempter says to the woman, “You won’t die. The truth is that God knows that in the day you eat from that tree, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The woman looks at the tree again and thinks to herself, I want to become wise. This is a temptation to which I am vulnerable. I want to be wise, to be discerning, to judge what is good and what is evil. In the terms of this story, I want to be like a god. So what might be the downside?

The downside is fear. When she and the man eat the fruit, the result is that for the first time, they fear meeting God face to face, they hide from God, God exposes them as having disobeyed, they are ashamed of who they are, human beings naked before God, and they leave the garden to enter a world of toil and shame, a world, as Stringfellow says, enslaved to death and the fear of death.

There is so much to explore in the temptation story that I will leave aside to focus on this. The woman was tempted to become like God, to be one who decides what is good and what is evil, to judge as God does. But when God judges, God knows all there is to know. Humans don’t. We are always judging from a basis of incomplete knowledge. In fact, we tend to identify the unknown as evil, and we learn to fear and even hate it. Thus the natural darkness of night becomes a place of terror because we don’t know what’s hidden by the dark; we become afraid that evil hides in dark places. We start identifying darkness with evil when, in fact, it is a part of God’s good creation.

We don’t even know everything about ourselves. Some aspects we aren’t even aware of until anger, stress or danger (names for fear) bring them to the surface. And some of what we know we don’t want to embrace as part of ourselves. It isn’t long before we are afraid to look inside ourselves; we start hating parts of ourselves that we don’t understand and we judge to be evil, and then start projecting that self-hatred onto other humans or the creation. 

As human cultures, we make systems to protect ourselves from the unknown, and these systems end up enslaving us. So we cannot stop stockpiling retirement resources, we cannot stop building more efficient ways to kill our enemies, we cannot risk losing the opportunities that higher education opens up, we cannot run up outrageous medical costs without insurance, we cannot admit that other persons or nations have the same rights we do. We are in bondage to all the ways we protect ourselves from what we fear. And we turn what we fear into an evil, whether God considers it thus or not. This is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And ultimately, the fear of the unknown is the fear of death, the great unknown.

We humans are already like God in one way: we bear God’s image, as the earlier creation narrative says. “Let us make humans in our image,” say the Trinity to each other, “male and female.” So in a fundamental sense, to be human is to be made in God’s image.  All humans, everywhere. As the gospel of John says, nothing was made without God’s Word, which lights up every person who comes into the world. And the Word became flesh, and lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory of God’s only begotten Son, full of grace and truth.

So the riddle is, why do humans, who are from the start made in God’s image, feel the need to become like God, judging and separating good from evil? Why do humans not just live in close relationship with God and let God judge and guide? Why do humans want to prove they are tough, in control, and able to lead? Why not pay attention to the one who is full of grace and truth? Why would any of us, when facing the choice, prefer to decide good and evil ourselves rather than to live receiving God’s judgment of good and evil? I think it is because we have a hard time with how God judges. We judge God’s judging, and God is either too harsh or too lenient.

As a child, I always liked the Bible stories where God wipes the floor with those who sin. I used to ask my sister to read me about Ananias and Sapphira when I was under 7 years old. For those who don’t remember, they lied to Peter the apostle and to the Holy Spirit of God about how much of their money they were giving to the gathered church, and they fell down dead. I think this must have operated like a horror movie for me, because I was always afraid of God’s judgment, based partly on that story and others like it and on my own tendency to run into trouble with my parents or other adults.

But now, as I am gradually learning in fits and starts how to be human in relationship to God, I am grateful for the patience of God, God’s long-suffering, and the mercy of God, God’s loving-kindness, and the grace of God that puts all of God’s resources on my side.

Jesus shows us how God judges when he says, “He causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” When he says, “You work so hard to have your outside self appear right and perfect, but God sees the dead bones and rotting flesh in your hidden life.” When he says, “O Jerusalem, how I long to gather you to myself like a hen with chicks, but you do not want that.” When he said, “You will deny knowing me. The accuser has desired to grind you up like wheat, but I have prayed for you, and when you return to knowing me, strengthen your fellow travelers.” When he said, “Where are your accusers? Neither do I condemn you. Go and don’t do this again.” When he said, “I came into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world through me might be saved.” When he said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” (I suspect Jesus prays this for us every moment of every day.)

I remember reading a poem by Robert Browning where an outsider to Jewish society meets the resurrected Lazarus and is astonished at his mixed up priorities. The traveling doctor cannot understand why Lazarus has no interest in the coming confrontation with Roman armies but concerns himself about trivial actions of his child. For those who don’t know, Lazarus has died and been brought back to life. The most feared unknown of all, death, has conquered him and then been conquered, and nothing is the same for Lazarus after. Browning imagines him observing the world with the eyes of a child, full of wonder and awareness of glory. He imagines him as especially characterized by “prone submission to the will of God, seeing it, what it is, and why it is.” Lazarus seeks, as the outsider puts it, not to please God more than as God pleases. In other words, his zeal to obey doesn’t outrun God’s word to him.  He does no more and no less than God asks of him.

[Lazarus] loves both old and young,

Able and weak, affects the very brutes [animals]

And birds—how say I? flowers of the field—

As a wise workman recognizes tools

In a master's workshop, loving what they make.

Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:

Only impatient, let him do his best,

At ignorance and carelessness and sin—

An indignation which is promptly curbed…

Robert Browning, “An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician”

This is a picture of how we can be human in relationship with God. Loving God’s creation, including ourselves; loving other humans, no barriers; living as obediently as we can in response to God’s conversation with us; resisting the urge to judge; seeing clearly and without fear; being “pleased to live just as long as God pleases, and living just as God pleases.” Jesus showed us how to live with absolute trust in God, and when we know that the great, glorious God has given us the gift of love and God’s self to love, we can also trust God with our days and our nights, we can trust God when we can see and when we are in the dark. God will lead us in right paths for God’s own sake. Let’s be who we are and let God be who God is.

Jesus, Privilege, Victims, and Empathy

John 8:1-16

Recently, an old friend said, “We are all victims.” A young queer acquaintance of mine wrote, “everyone is not a victim. everyone does not experience harm in the same way.” So I spoke to my old friend and said, “Your words were hurtful.” He reiterated his belief that we are all victims. And I said, “Until you are willing to say publicly why you are a victim, how you’ve been victimized, you don’t get to say, ‘we.’”

The #metoo campaign startled a lot of my (male) friends. Surely it isn’t true that so many (all?) the women they know have been sexually harassed or abused. Surely the women who said #metoo need to publicly say how they were victimized. Otherwise, how can people know if the women are telling the truth or are exaggerating the harm or even making things up? So said (some of) my (male) friends.

As an aside, I really liked the idea someone put forward that men should ask themselves, “Would I treat Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson like this?” If the answer is no, then don’t treat the woman or girl like that either. If you wouldn’t extend a hug past 2-3 seconds for “The Rock,” then don’t do so for a female friend or acquaintance. If you wouldn’t spread into Dwayne’s space, don’t spread into hers. If you wouldn’t ask Mr. Johnson for a kiss—or just plant one on his lips—don’t try it with a woman. (Interestingly, women will need a different image to deter them from sexually harassing a man—maybe they need to envision a giant toad or a cobra or a python. This might also help women know when we can say “no.”)

So, back to the main story. I said on my FaceBook page, “Me too,” and I didn’t publish there why I posted it. I estimate at least ten percent of my FB friends know part of my reason for joining in, but not one of them knows all the reasons. And I don’t plan to put my life history in the public eye to justify my use of the phrase.

So we have a conundrum here. I want my old friend (white, male) to ante up his story of victimization before he can join in with #metoo, before he can say, “We are all victims,” but I can hardly bear to tell my counselor—sworn as she is to confidentiality—all the ways I’ve been victimized. Shame, self-blame—these cause me to withhold many experiences. And then there’s fear—the fear that if I share, the response will be, “What did you do to cause him to treat you like that?” And a new harm will be added to my collection. Or the response will be, “You need to forgive,” as if forgiveness erased pain, shame, self-loathing, fear. The lack of empathy for the seven year old I was (and inside still am) is a failure of imagination.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but religion may be the first, judging from my experiences. As a Christian child and woman, it pains and angers me to say that nearly all my victim experiences have been perpetrated by Christian men. The main exception is bullying/abuse by bigger kids, though these were in Christian school.

The way it works, as I see it, is this: a person of privilege has to drag out the story of victimization in order to show that he or she has the standing to speak to/with other victims. Those with less privilege can say #metoo, and they do not have to drag all the shaming things that have happened to them into the light. But when these things are dragged into the light, privilege may have something to answer for.

We can see the torture—perhaps even unmentionable rape by Roman soldiers—and crucifixion as evidence Jesus knows what we experience when we are harassed or abused. And these end-life events were not his only moments of rejection, shame, and threat of personal harm.

When he publicly claimed that God was sending him, that he was the one, his hometown folk tried to kill him, to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:29). Jerusalem folks threatened to stone him (John 8:59, 10:31). He evaded these physical harms, but the rejection fueled many of his hot statements condemning faithlessness and hypocrisy. The long-term result of Jesus’s victimization is the deconstruction of privilege everywhere.

A story found in John’s Gospel shows us this.

As a Jewish male—and one often recognized as a rabbi—Jesus had some of the marks of privilege in his culture. At the same time, his country was occupied by Roman soldiers, some of whom, it appears from John the Baptizer, extorted money from the citizenry and bullied unprotected Jews. Jesus’s privilege was also bounded by his status as illegitimate, which limited his ability to marry and made him a target for malicious ridicule (John 8:41).

Jesus used his privilege to welcome (Zaccheus the taxman, the sinful woman and her tears, the hemorrhaging woman, the children) and to confront (the rich young ruler, the religious elites, his own disciples, the Syro-Phoenician woman). He gave away privilege to talk as equal human beings with the Samaritan woman, with Mary and Martha at Lazarus’s tomb, with his mother Mary at the Cana wedding.

So Jesus’s behavior chronicled elsewhere in the Gospels is in line with what we see in the story of the woman taken in adultery and brought to him for judgment. The men in this story have all the privilege. The absence of the male adulterer speaks to this fact. The crowd speak to Jesus as a person of privilege—male, Jewish, a rabbi—and test him to see if he belongs with them. Will he uphold the system that privileges him?

Jesus resists their manipulations. He takes his own sweet time to sketch in the dirt. He knows he is inside a hostile circle. He knows a stray rock—or many stray rocks—may hit him as they punish the sinful woman. He knows that the only way to retain privilege and to stay personally safe is to step away from the woman and join those holding stones. But he stays beside her and challenges the crowd. He raises the double standard which privilege makes the norm when he says, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”

As the members drop their stones and slink away, he speaks to the woman. I have always seen her in my imagination as cowering in terror, but perhaps she was defiant, loud, shouting to the crowd that she knew things about them, that she might hurt them if she got a chance. Either way, as the members drop the rocks and edge away, Jesus speaks to the woman, cowering or shouting obscenities, inviting her to be calm, to look around, to go without shame or blame, to go forward as a responsible human being.

So what can we learn from Jesus about privilege, about #metoo, about “we are all victims”?

1.     What Jesus does is to stand by the least powerful person and against the crowd. As the only one on the scene with the qualifications to act as judge and jury, Jesus chooses to be with the accused and to share her fate.

2.     What Jesus exposes, at the same time, is that all are sinners. All have erred, strayed, avoided obeying, disobeyed, bent what is true, and so on. No one has superior status, either social or moral. We have to confront personally and seriously our own carelessness or cruelty as part of learning how to be humane, to be kind rather than victimizers. Not one of us gets to be judge and jury for another.

3.     To say “We are all sinners” is not the same as saying, “We are all victims.” It is saying “We have all done harm to others, we are all complicit in making others into victims.”

4.     So whenever we find ourselves in a crowd with rocks in our hands, we will find Jesus standing beside the person who is about to die, whose shame and fear are leaking out everywhere, who feels completely alone.

5.     Jesus told us, “Just as you have acted toward the least—the powerless, the alien, the despised other—you have acted toward me. When you assert your privilege to exclude, silence, shame, blame, diminish, even destroy another person, you are doing the same to me.”

William Blake pointed out that it is natural for those who have experienced tyranny to rebel against it and to overthrow it. It is also natural for the former rebels to become tyrants in their turn. We who have privilege can break this cycle. We must recognize who the outsider is, whom the present system victimizes, and stand beside them against the powers that be. The tide can turn, and those who previously stood above in the place of privilege can find themselves in the center of the circle, threatened with stoning. In that moment, Jesus stands inside the circle again, drawing in the dirt, facing the accusers with the same challenge. “Let those among you without sin cast the first stone.”

"You’ll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry"--Bob Dylan

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Romans 12 and 14: No Judgment in a Heart at Peace

A Friends (Quaker) Perspective on Romans and Galatians

Provided several years ago for Illuminate, an adult Sunday School curriculum published by Barclay Press, a Friends publishing house

Lesson 9

Romans 12:1-8, 14, 17-21

In Romans 9-11, Paul revisits the comparison between Jews and Gentiles in relation to the faith in God that sets people right with God, each other, and themselves. Most notable is the cautionary example of the Jews, the chosen people through whom came the law, the worship, the promises, and the Messiah (Romans 9:4-5). The Jews, says Paul, look for righteousness based on fulfilling the law and fail, and are thus outside the life of faith and caught in a life of works. We in the church are often in the same place as these folks. It is so human to prefer the known, the law, to the unknown, God’s grace and God’s Spirit. Jesus told Nicodemus that the wind blows where it chooses and humans do not understand where it comes from or where it goes, and that this is the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3:8).

Romans 12 helps us recognize the Spirit’s work, but it is not a new set of laws. Instead, because of what Jesus has already accomplished through identifying with our humanity, our sin, and our death, and through prefiguring the resurrection we all hope for, we are free to offer our whole selves, body and soul, to the service of God. We don’t have to be pawns of the forces that dominate our social world. As we obey God with our bodies, we worship God in spirit and in truth. God renews our minds so we can see clearly the good, acceptable, complete actions that are the will of God for us.

We use the gifts God gives us, as Jesus illustrated in the parable of the stewards. We treasure and care for the gifts of others. We aren’t tied up in the knots of competitiveness and self-sufficiency. We can lay down our sword and shield and study war no more.

The most important practical faith lesson I’ve learned recently is the importance of having a heart at peace toward those who I believe need to change. This is a spiritual discipline for me and involves praying blessing on them and for God to judge between us. And this prayer is frequent, just as frequent as the thought of conflict arises.

Lesson 10

Romans 14:1, 5-17

Underlying Romans 14 is this principle from Romans 13:8-10: all the interpersonal laws are summed up in “love your neighbor as yourself,” just as Jesus said. This means that we live honorably as if under a spotlight, which is where we are (John 3:21).

What about other believers who hold the wrong opinions?  Paul says, welcome them, but don’t argue with them. God has welcomed them. It is before God they stand or fall, not before us. Like us, whether they live or die, they are the Lord’s because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is one practical application of the law of love. Surely we can imagine that as we are judging them for wrong opinions, they are returning that judgment on us, unless we obey the law of love.

The advice not to judge repeats Romans 2. After the list of sins in Romans 1, therefore, Paul says, do not judge, since all have sinned. Here he says, do not judge, since you are no one’s boss, and all believers are accountable to God for how they obey. If a person hears from God that some behavior is unholy, that person must obey. The Gentiles and Jews to whom Paul wrote had different boundaries, and all still had to treat others with tenderness and love.

Another practical application of the law of love is that we don’t push people to violate their sense of what God wants from them. We respect the boundaries people believe God has given them. We don’t think we are better because God allows us different boundaries. Romans 12:3 tells us not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought and to respect the fact that not all members of the body of Christ will function exactly like us.

Many times, I think, what causes our brother or sister to stumble is not a freedom in Christ we live into with joy and gratitude but rather the judgment that we pass on that brother and sister who does things differently from us, whether with more or less freedom. When we judge, we place ourselves as superior to the one being judged. Instead, we who are Spirit-led must be humble and obey God ourselves.

God the Gardener, Part III: Identifying Plants by their Fruit

From the parables about fruitlessness and the sower and seed parable, we learn to ask ourselves and God’s Spirit the following questions: 

Are you saying something to me that I am missing?

Are you saying something to me that isn’t getting into my deepest soul?

Are you saying something to me that I haven’t incorporated into how I live?

What are you saying to me that I welcome eagerly, honestly, openly, and obediently?

Some clues to how we can answer the above questions show up in the parables where Jesus talks about identifying plants by their fruit.

False Prophets: Matthew 7:15-20, Luke 6:43-45

Jesus says, “And recognize those who claim to be speaking God’s truth but are themselves false. They come looking harmless but from deep inside are rapacious, hungry, thieving extortioners.  You will find them out by their actions, the results of their actions, their fruits.  Can anyone find grapes on brambles or figs on thistles? A good tree—useful, health-producing—bears lovely and strengthening fruit, but a worthless, worn out, unfit, rotten tree bears diseased fruit, causing pain and trouble. A healthy tree cannot bear diseased fruit that causes pain and trouble; neither can a rotten tree bear lovely, healthy fruit that increases strength. Every tree that does not bear lovely, healthy fruit is cut down and cast onto the bonfire. Therefore, recognize false from true prophets by their fruits.”

By inference from what characterizes false prophets we can learn what characterizes true prophets.

False prophets:                                               True prophets: (the opposites)

Rapacious (greedy, predatory)                       Generous, self-sacrificing                            

Hungry (unsatisfied)                                      Satisfied, content

Thieving (taking by guile or force)                Respecting boundaries

Extorting (forcing by fear)                             Guarding

Causing pain                                                  Bringing healing

Causing trouble                                              Bringing peace

What makes the difference?  Even if the truth is the same, what is inside the prophet makes a big difference; truth told with a bad intent beats all the lies you can invent (William Blake).

Attributing the Good Work of God’s Spirit to the Devil: Matthew 12:33-37

The context for this passage is verse 24:

When the Pharisees heard [that Jesus deprived demons of their power over people] they said, “This one does not have power over demons except with the permission of or by means of Beelzebub, the lord over evil spirits.”

Jesus disputed their accusation by saying, “If I have power over demons by the Spirit of God, the Kingdom of God has come to you.” And then he went on to say that it is impossible to send away (forgive) the slander against the Holy Ghost of attributing evil to the Holy Ghost or crediting the Devil with the good done by the Holy Ghost.  I think the impossibility is because the people who do this have such an upside down view of things that their need to repent is invisible to them. If they think God does evil and the devil does good, how can they turn to God?”

So now to our parable.

“Either make the tree good and the fruit it produces healthy and useful, or make the tree rotten and corrupt and its fruit unfit for use; thus the tree is known, understood, by its fruit.

“Children of vipers, how are you, diseased, blind, and wicked as you are, how are you able to say anything good or useful or honorable? Thus, what fills your heart shows up in what your mouth says. A good person brings valuable, precious, good things out of the good treasury of the heart, and a wicked person brings harassing, annoying, pain-causing, troublesome things out of the wicked treasury of the heart. 

“Additionally, I tell you that every lazy word, every time people speak in a way that evades the good they know to do and say, creates a debt that they will have to pay up, restore on the day of judgment. Thus out of their words comes the judgment of  innocence or guilt.”

Wow!  Just as Jesus does with the “you have heard it said do not kill” and he goes inside to “do not be filled with rage” earlier in Matthew, here he says words are as important as actions, and they reveal what is in the heart. 

This parable has several directions it can take:

First, what does it say about other people or other congregations or other denominations?

Basically, Jesus tells us to take a look at outcomes.  Do we see a swath of destruction in the wake of another person or group?  Do the leaders get rich off the followers?  Do people come away from meetings more likely to behave lovingly or more likely to behave angrily or judgmentally?  Does interpersonal abuse flourish?  Is an individual causing mistrust and division between friends?  Is an individual creating chaos rather than peace?  We are expected to be wise as serpents and harmless or innocent as doves, not children of vipers as above.  In other words, pay attention and don’t be naïve.

Further, pay attention as well to what people say and how they use words.  Do they use words to blame others?  Do they use words to evade responsibility? Do they create a deficit of love by how they speak?

Second, what does it say about me personally or us as a congregation or denomination?

Individually, we need to examine our own hearts and open them to the searchlight love of God to show us if we are operating out of greed, hunger, fear, bullying or whether we are operating out of love.  We can do better by knowing ourselves better and cutting ourselves less slack at others’ expense. We can listen to how we talk and what we are trying to do with language.  We can ask God to help us see how we are blaming others, how we are evading the responsibility we have to be loving.

We cannot know when we see a person in a limited period of time whether that person is moving toward or away from God and the law of love.  People in transition can cause harm that they are just inches away from regretting.  Or they can be just inches away from justifying the harm by blaming it on someone else.  In the first case, they will repent and can learn to make better choices; in the second case, they make it easy to do harm again. 

However, we do have a responsibility in church discipline to say to a person causing harm, “Stop it.” We don’t have to speculate about the direction of their spiritual journey and judge them as unfit for God’s Kingdom. We just have to act out of hearts of love for the person AND for the other people he or she harms. 

This is extremely hard work.  It is easier to tell someone they are doing wrong when we are angry.  But the Bible is very clear that the proper approach is humble and loving, with full awareness of our own weakness and areas of blindness.