There are few things more instructive than watching an honest man be perfectly wrong. I had occasion to observe this curious phenomenon during what should have been an unremarkable game of pool. My friend, and he is both friend and honest man, stood over the final shot, the black ball between him and victory. My green ball lay awkwardly in his path, making a clean shot nearly impossible. He struck anyway, hoping perhaps to thread that narrow passage or at least avoid disaster.
The black ball remained stubbornly in place. The cue ball rolled to a stop. And my green ball, though he did not see it, moved just perceptibly. He had struck it first. A clear foul, yet one invisible to the man who committed it.
On the Peculiar Blindness of Concentrated Vision
When I pointed out what had occurred, his reaction was immediate and telling. Not the bluster of a caught cheat, but the genuine bewilderment of a man whose direct experience has been challenged. He had been watching the same table at the same moment, yet we had witnessed entirely different events.
The psychologists have a name for this: inattentional blindness. Focus intently on counting basketball passes and you will miss the man in the gorilla suit walking through your field of vision. The mind, it seems, is less a camera than an editor, constantly deciding what deserves attention and what can be safely ignored.
But if this is true of our physical sight, how much truer might it be of our spiritual perception? We imagine ourselves alert, observant, clear-sighted in matters of the soul. Yet are we not often like my friend; earnest, well-intentioned, and completely mistaken about what we have just witnessed?
The Daily Game We Think We’re Playing
Consider how we spend our days. There are emails to answer, deadlines to meet, relationships to maintain, bodies to exercise, homes to improve. These are not evil pursuits—many are positively good. But they form a kind of game, full of movement and color, success and failure, urgent demands upon our attention.
And while we are absorbed in this game of daily life, Christ himself might walk through the room and we would not see him. Not because we are wicked, but because we are busy. Not because we have rejected the eternal, but because we are so focused on the temporal that the eternal becomes, quite literally, invisible to us.
We are like people counting passes while the most important event in history unfolds just outside our narrow field of attention.
The Resistance to Unwelcome Truth
Yet even when our blindness is pointed out; gently, kindly, by someone we trust—there remains that curious resistance. Something in us recoils from being corrected, even about matters of small consequence. How much more when the correction touches upon our deepest assumptions about reality?
This resistance is not mere pride, though pride plays its part. It is the natural revolt of a mind that has organized itself around one version of events being told that version is incomplete or false. To accept such correction requires not merely intellectual humility but a kind of death, the death of our certainty about what we have seen and understood.
And yet, might this death be exactly what is required? For if we are wrong about small things, pool shots and gorilla suits, how can we be certain we are right about the great things: the meaning of our lives, the reality of God, the true nature of what matters most?
The Deeper Stakes
The pool game was merely amusing. But the principle it illustrated is anything but trivial. Every day we make choices about where to direct our attention, what deserves our focus, which goals merit our pursuit. And every day we risk committing the same error as my friend: so absorbed in our immediate objective that we miss the larger reality surrounding it.
We aim for worldly success while fouling against divine law. We pursue happiness while missing joy. We seek to be right while remaining blind to truth. And like my friend, we often do so with perfect sincerity, convinced we are seeing clearly even as we stumble through a world far richer and more complex than our narrow focus allows us to perceive.
The tragedy is not that we are evil, but that we are distracted. Not that we consciously choose darkness, but that we are so dazzled by lesser lights that we cannot see the true Light shining just beyond our peripheral vision.
On True Sight
When Christ speaks of having “eyes to see,” he is not offering us better physical vision but an entirely different kind of sight. He calls us to perceive the Kingdom of Heaven breaking into ordinary Tuesday afternoons, to recognize eternal significance in temporal encounters, to see the sacred hidden within the mundane.
This sight cannot be achieved through effort alone, though effort has its place. It requires a certain receptivity, a willingness to be surprised by what we have overlooked, a readiness to discover that the game we thought we were playing is not the only game, or even the most important game, in progress.
For in the end, all our careful concentration on worldly matters may amount to missing the one shot that truly counts: the recognition that we are loved, forgiven, and called to something infinitely greater than our own small ambitions.
Epilogue: The Gentle Comedy of Self-Discovery
I was quite pleased with these observations, right up until the moment I realised they applied not to my friend but to myself. For while I had been noting his inability to see the obvious, I had been blind to my own patterns of selective attention. While analysing his foul, I had been committing one far more serious: the foul of using another’s failings as a comfortable distraction from examining my own.
The pool game, I suddenly understood, had never been about his blindness at all. It had been about mine. God, it seems, has an excellent sense of timing and an even better sense of humor. He had used my friend’s small error to reveal my much larger one: the tendency to see clearly when looking at others while remaining mysteriously myopic when the mirror turns toward myself.
This is, I suspect, how divine instruction often works—not through thundering commandments but through gentle comedy, the kind that makes you laugh at your own expense while simultaneously opening your eyes to truths you had been too self-satisfied to see.
The real foul was not at the pool table but in the soul. And the real victory was not in spotting it in another, but in finally recognising it as my own. For as I have learned, repeatedly and often to my chagrin, God’s parables are rarely about other people. They pass through our own hearts first, and the lesson we think we are teaching invariably turns out to be the lesson we most need to learn.
Perhaps this is the deepest blindness of all: imagining that the story is about someone else when it has been about us all along.
