Pure Vision

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Chuck Close is the world’s most celebrated portrait artist, with exhibitions in places like the MOMA, the Tate, the Pompidou. He’s also blind. Well, not exactly. He can see the world like most people. Just not faces. He has a form of perceptual condition called pro-so-pag-nosia. He doesn’t even recognize people he knows well, not by their face anyway, not even himself. How he paints is ingenious, breaking down photographs and working from the pieces of a grid. I’ll leave the research to you if you’re interested.

I tell you about Chuck because of the way he provides insight into today’s text. His condition renders him incapable of seeing something that’s all around him. Ours does too. Pro-so-pag-nosia makes Chuck incapable of seeing faces. Impurity of heart makes us blind to God. That’s what’s implied in Jesus statement:

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’

To understand a text like today’s, it’s necessary to see how ideas of purity and impurity (things like innocence, spotlessness, or contamination and pollution) have migrated from one area of our understanding to another domain entirely. Where they once applied to morality and our spiritual condition, they’re now used almost exclusively in a scientific sense, having to do with the way foreign elements compromise or harm some specimen or system.

Linguistic vestiges of those older ideas still remain, of course, in the way we sometime say: that guy’s a real dirtbag a slimeball, or my hands are clean…

But, people no longer think about morality in terms of cleanliness and purity. Whether that’s a helpful or not, I have no idea. Just to say, it’s worth noting because of the way it can conceal what Jesus is trying to show us.

His general point seems straightforward enough: that there’s a connection between the condition of our hearts and our perceptual faculties, specifically our ability to see the most important thing there is, which is God.

And because purity is no longer found in our lexicon of moral concepts, it is worth trying to understand what might have been meant by describing our spiritual condition in terms of purity. Otherwise, we risk missing what’s at stake in allowing moral contaminants to pollute our lives, whatever they turn out to be.

We can start by looking at the way the idea shows up today and then thinking backwards, seeing if contemporary examples can illuminate older ways of thinking. Today, we encounter purity in two places.

First, think of the images you see on BBC documentaries. Museum staff are handling ancient texts. They wear gloves. And if the document is ancient, or valuable, or fragile enough, they sometimes don’t even touch it, using sterilized instruments to manipulate the pages instead. The reason has to do with purity, with the way foreign elements, like the oils from our skin, or the chemicals from our soaps, corrode the paper over time.

Or think about people you’ve seen working with radioactive materials. They cover themselves in hazmat suits to protect against the effects of exposure to radiation. The idea has to do with purity, with the way exposure to something harmful outside can be harmful to something inside, corrupting, or making us otherwise unwell. That’s one way we think about impurity today.

There’s another way. The easiest example, is also a biblical one. It has to do with the elemental purity of precious metals, like gold, and the metallurgic process of removing impure elements, dross, by exposing it to extreme heat.

This idea of purity is seen elsewhere as well - the main being pollution and the distorting effects on the climate and our ecosystems that comes from overwhelming it with contaminants. This idea of purity is internal. It has to do with the absence of adulteration; purity in the sense of being un-alloyed, or un-mixed. Something is pure when there are no foreign elements blended in. And when they are, they need to come out – in the case of pollution, because of the harms it causes; with gold, because those elements detract from its rarity, beauty and worth – or because they limit its usefulness.

So, purity works in both ways, from the inside out and from the outside in.

Now back to our spiritual lives? I think the idea is that there can be things internal to us, (ideas, attitudes, values, ambitions), that impede the way we’re supposed to function, in the sense that they cause our internal processes to malfunction, make us unwell, or limit our ability to live as we ought.

Other times, we can come into contact with external things that have similarly negative effects. By which I mean that there are some things in the moral universe that are hazardous, they undermine or diminish us. A useful illustration of the idea here is cataracts, which are impurities often forming over the eye as a result of exposure to radiation. Something similar can happen with our psycho-spiritual, moral faculties.

The question is: What might some of those things be? And, what should we do about them? I’ll come back to that.

First, I just want to be clear: Jesus overriding concern here is with our flourishing and with the way ‘impurity’ can compromise our capacity to see the most valuable and important things - by which I think he means: God’s truth, goodness and beauty; God’s presence in the world; to sense God’s guidance; to recognize where God is at work; or perhaps even to feel God’s nearness in suffering – all of which is essential to our flourishing. What he’s not doing is using purity to coerce us into obeying some legalistic set of rules or prohibitions. That’s not his game.

Chuck Close found a way to deal with his inability to see faces, by breaking down images into tiny pieces. But, that’s not how we confront our God-blindness. For us, the solution is to seek purity of heart; continually practicing a discipline of moral self-diagnosis, identifying impurities in our lives, and, with God’s help, addressing them.

Internal impurities might include ideas about ourselves, maybe that we’re not loveable, not intelligent, have nothing to contribute, have no purpose, that no one cares about you – or alternatively that you’re smarter or better, that your race, or class, or education, or nationality or gender make somehow superior, as though others are below you.

It might include values, like caring more about carnal pleasure than your neighbour, or valuing things more than the the environment, or valuing your own interests over being Christ like. There are endless possibilities. The point is they all impede our ability to see God, and therefore to know, enjoy and follow God .

There are external things too: we can become embroiled in social relations that are defiling – being subject to certain kinds of abuse or disrespect. We can join groups or parties whose ideals run counter to Jesus’ Kingdom. We can participate in cultural practices that harm vulnerable groups, or consumerist practices that destroy our world.

Sometimes such things can even filter into the Church, where we esteem gifted people over the giver of their gifts, where we reduce worship to commodity, where we pretend that the good news of Jesus’ gospel is about individual benefit, gifts or prosperity. These things are impure because they twist and divert, mixing in elements undermining our ability to see God’s truth and goodness.  

Jesus Gospel is about God’s inbreaking Kingdom. That Kingdom has a culture, a way of living and acting that results in what Jesus calls Makarios – the kind of flourishing and life-satisfaction that comes from living the as you were created to live. One of the practices central to this life, one practices of Christ’s Kingdom, involves seeking to acknowledge and confront, both as individuals and as a community, those things that leave us blind and to correct them with God’s help.

The Psalmist gives us a prayer expressing the heart of this practice.

Create in me a clean heart, oh God; and renew a right spirit within me.

Don’t isolate me from your presence; don’t take away your Holy Spirit,

Make my heart willing to be more like you.

What results, says the Psalmist, foreshadows Jesus’ own promise: that we’ll know the joy of our salvation – we’ll find happiness.

My hope is that we’d internalize the attitude and aspiration of this prayer – That we’d make it our prayer and that God would heal our spiritual blindness, enabling us to know the joy of his salvation more fully as a result.