The Tactile Heart: Blindness and Faith

The Tactile Heart

Also by John M. Hull

Sense and Nonsense About God

Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition

School Worship – An Obituary

Studies in Religion and Education

What Prevents Christian Adults from Learning?

The Act Unpacked: The Meaning of the 1988 Education Reform Act for Religious Education

Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness

God-Talk with Young Children

Mishmash: Religious Education in Multi-Cultural Britain, A Study in Metaphor

On Sight and Insight: A Journey into the World of Blindness

Utopian Whispers: Moral, Religious and Spiritual Values in Schools

In the Beginning There Was Darkness: A Blind Person’s Conversations with the Bible

Mission-Shaped Church: A Theological Response

The Tactile Heart

Blindness and Faith

John M. Hull

© John M. Hull 2013

Published in 2013 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission.

The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 0 334 04933 3

Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

Contents

Preface

1. The Tactile Heart

2. Milton, Paradise Lost and Blindness

3. The Material Spirituality of Blindness and Money

4. Open Letter from a Blind Disciple to a Sighted Saviour: Text and Discussion

5. Blindness and the Face of God: Toward a Theology of Disability

6. A Spirituality of Disability: The Christian Heritage as Both Problem and Potential

7. Is Blindness a World? From Theology of Impairment to Theology of Disability

8. The Broken Body in a Broken World: A Contribution to a Christian Doctrine of the Person from a Disabled Point of View

9. ‘Sight to the Inly Blind’? Attitudes to Blindness in the Hymnbooks

10. ‘Lord, I was Deaf’: Images of Disability in the Hymnbooks

11. Teaching as a Trans-world Activity

Acknowledgements of Previous Publication

For Marilyn

I hate all sighted things but for your sake I love them.

It was because of you that I embraced blindness;

You gave me strength to turn from the world of nostalgic images

And face the dark future where you are.

I hate the darkness that hides me from you

And I hate the light which hides you from me.

I love both worlds, yours and mine

And so across the worlds, I love you.

Preface

I became a registered blind person in August 1980. It did not occur to me that there was anything particularly interesting or remarkable about blindness; it was all perfectly straightforward although admittedly most inconvenient: blindness is when your eyes don’t work and you need to find other ways of doing things. Three years later my attitude changed. The last traces of light sensation had faded, and the lingering hope of some slight improvement had been crushed. I was now disorientated in the world, not only by what blindness was doing to me but by the nature of blindness itself. I did not set out to write about blindness. My first book on this subject, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness (1990), was based upon a series of tape recordings made over a number of years in order to enable me to monitor and meditate upon the changes that were taking place. These original recordings from the mid-1980s have now been retrieved by Fee Fie Foe Films, who are using them as the basis of a film about blindness which will be released in 2014 or 2015 under the title Into Darkness. An enlarged second edition of Touching the Rock was published in 1997 under the title On Sight and Insight. The original Touching the Rock was republished as an SPCK Classic in May 2013.

Although the experience of blindness changed the way I thought of God, it was not a challenge to my faith, so much as to my imagination. The imagery of light was replaced by the more intimate meanings of darkness. When I read the Bible as a blind person, however, it was a different matter. In the Beginning There was Darkness: A Blind Person’s Conversations with the Bible (2001) describes how I came to realize that the Bible was mostly written by sighted people. The disturbing fact that the Gospels portrayed Jesus as a sighted person sharing the usual first-century attitudes towards blindness came as a shock. My earlier reflections had been of a personal nature but now the foundations were laid for a more thoughtful theology of blindness. This took the shape of a number of reflections upon Christian faith including some analysis of the phenomenology of the blind condition and its significance for social and ethical living.

This present book, The Tactile Heart: Studies in Blindness and Faith, is a collection of these studies, most of which have been published as book chapters and periodical articles although a couple are appearing here for the first time. These meditations on sightlessness, now spread over 30 years, have moved from the autobiographical, in which I tried to understand myself, to the biblical, in which I tried to understand Scripture, and now to a more mature but still fragmentary series of reflections upon the deeper meaning of blindness for the religious life.

I am grateful to the RNIB who in 2012 presented me with a lifetime achievement award for contributions to the literature of blindness, and to The Allan & Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust and the Westhill Endowment Trust, whose generous support has made this work possible. I am also grateful to Natalie Watson of the SCM Press for her careful work in preparing the text.

These writings on blindness have been the subject of music, drama, poetry and works of art, which have given a wider scope to my intentions of bridging the blind and sighted worlds and of interpreting one to the other. The most profound and redemptive experience of these two worlds has been my relationship with Marilyn, to whom this book is dedicated.

John M. Hull

The Queen’s Foundation for

Ecumenical Theological Education

Birmingham

1. The Tactile Heart

The beauties of touch are, I suppose, largely hidden from many sighted people. For those who go blind in adult life, the loss of beauty must be one of the most perplexing problems. Those in the blind state who do not wish to remain as sighted people who cannot see, but to become authentic blind people, will find that discovering the beauty of touch is one of their most important tasks.

In my own experience – perhaps I am not alone in this – one passes through three stages in the learning of tactile beauty. First, there is the stage when, with our hands, we learn again to do. There is the second stage when, with our hands, we learn to know. Finally, there is that stage when, with our hands, we learn to appreciate beauty.

The first stage, the doing stage, is in itself sufficiently perplexing. So accustomed are sighted people to think of the eye and the hand as being interlocked that the separation of the eye from the hand, which is the condition of blindness, causes considerable puzzlement. It takes time for both blind and sighted to realize that you don’t have to see to do up your shoelaces, to brush your teeth or put on your tie, although I must admit that it helps a little to know what tie you are putting on. It takes time to realize that, as a blind person trying to unlock a door, you have to remember what it was like coming home late at night drunk. You need one hand to locate the keyhole and the other hand to shove the key in. This is an example of blind doing.

When one has rediscovered blind doing through the hand, the next stage is more difficult. To move on to blind knowing is so much more complex. Of course, sighted people do use their hands for knowing. One licks one’s finger and sticks it up in a breeze. One touches something to discover whether or not it is hot, and one says ‘ouch’. These experiences are relatively isolated for the sighted. In the case of the blind, we see with our fingers more regularly. For us, tactile knowing is our standard form of knowledge.

It is surprising, for those who lose sight, how difficult this is, although for those blind from birth it is, of course, their natural form of knowledge. I well remember, as a recently blinded person, learning again to play chess with my children. How difficult I found it to remember that in the case of the blind one not only moves the pieces with one’s fingers; one knows the whole structure of the board with one’s fingers. One must not try to hold in one’s imagination a picture of the board with its black and white pieces, but one must learn to play the game with one’s hands. One must let the hands solve that intricate puzzle of tiny relationships which is typical of tactile knowing.

In the last month, I have started to learn to play the piano. As I explore my major musical achievement so far, which is the key of C in contrary motion, I try to repress that image of the black and white notes of the keyboard which keeps coming before my mind. My hands are beyond light and darkness. To me it is nothing that there are black and white keys. My fingers have to learn that the keys are grouped in bunches spread out in rows across a space; some stick up and some are flat. They are arranged into these little groups of twos and threes. This is what my hands know and this is the way my mind has to work to play the piano. I must, in other words, have a tactile brain which will match my tactile form of knowing.

When we arrive at the third stage, the stage of discovering tactile beauty, we reach realms that are yet more subtle. Here, I think, there is not such a difference between those born blind and those who have lost some sight or all sight later in life. Just as sighted people need continual education in how to appreciate visual beauty, so blind people of all kinds need education in order to appreciate tactile beauty. It is foolish for blind people to sit around bemoaning the loss of the moon and the mountain. For us, beauty is more intimate, more concrete, more immediate, more particular. Gradually the blind rediscover the beauty of ordinary things. In the world of blind beauty we rediscover the loveliness of cups and saucers, of milk bottles and teaspoons, of rocks and bricks, of the bark of trees and the feel of human hair.

One of the remarkable things about tactile beauty is the element of surprise. I admit that not all tactile surprise is particularly beautiful, and I have frequently been surprised by a very tactile encounter with a lamp-post or the edge of a door. Nevertheless, one of the treasures of blindness is the great capacity to be surprised by joy. A dozen times a day we blind people find ourselves holding something in our hands, whether it is a cat or a cushion, and saying, ‘Oh, so that’s what it’s like.’ That capacity for immediate surprise is one of the delights of the tactile beauty which is only accessible to the blind.

I have spoken of the tactile brain. Now I would like to move on to the tactile heart, because, although we know with our brains, we feel with our hearts. How interesting that we should feel both with our fingers and with our hearts! It may be that in the case of the totally blind the intimate link between the eye and the finger is broken, but the other equally intimate connection between the finger and the heart may be restored.

Let us think how the tactile heart is used in religious imagination to express our response to God. In tactile doing, knowing and appreciating beauty, we find metaphors of our human condition before God. Do you remember how the Lord God made us human beings in the first place? Did God not kneel down in the dust of the earth and use fingers to mould us? Did God not hold us, warm against God’s own body, and breathe into us the breath of life? So we became living men and women. We are close to the heart of this tactile God.

Do we not remember those stories about Jesus Christ? His contemporaries were amazed because he touched people. He touched the untouchable, the unlovely, the poor and the sick. He laid his hands upon little children. Moreover, he made himself available to be touched, for to touch is to be touched. So it was that Thomas was invited to touch his hands and his side, and when the first Christians looked back and described the experience they had had of God in Christ, they spoke of that which they had touched with their hands (1 John 1.1).

2. Milton, Paradise Lost and Blindness

Blind and sighted people experience the world in such different ways that it is quite difficult for one to really understand the other. Paradise Lost was written by a blind person but its readers are usually sighted people. For most of these, the fact that John Milton was blind would be no more than a passing thought, mixed, perhaps, with some curiosity about how he managed to do it, and the compassion that is characteristic of the attitude of sighted people towards blind friends, but no more. It would not occur to many sighted people that blindness itself might be a significant clue to understanding the poem.

To be more precise, the poem is not so much about blindness as about the experience of losing sight in adult life. This is described first in all the horror and despair of the initial impact, and then with a kind of calm and accepting sadness. The first phase is depicted as the loss of heaven and the fall into the abyss, and the second phase is represented by the loss of the garden of paradise and the mixture of resignation and hope with which a new kind of world is faced.

As Satan, the blind Milton falls from the world of light into a place where

A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible …¹

When you lose your sight, it is as if the world has closed in upon you; you are trapped inside your body feeling the claustrophobia of a ‘prison ordained / In utter darkness’, ‘far removed from God and light of heaven’, made worse by the painful memory of the past: ‘O how unlike the place from which they fell!’²

The question is then whether to bow your head and sink into passivity, or whether to find

courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?³

It has been said that