“Your eye is like a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is filled with light.

– Jesus, Matthew 6:22

Today I have just a couple of things to share, both falling into the category of “New Eyes”, or “I haven’t tried this before!”

Seeing, understanding how we look at the world around us and how we look at ourselves, is of course fundamental to engaging our true potential as beings created in the image of God. We all know the famous dictum attributed to Socrates – the unexamined life is not worth living – but it is a standard we all by degrees fail to apply with much consistency.

Asking good questions; questioning ourselves; engaging in productive debate; trying to understand why it is that we think, believe, act, assume the things that we do; being willing to admit the liberating fact that we are all wrong likely just as often as we are right….

Not that I am advocating for “aggressive doubt” so much as I am “progressive thoughtfulness”, and the willingness to at least talk about how we see the world and our relationship to truth. Truth, of course, being a much deeper and more complete idea than mere facts.

So perspective. So innovation. So imagination. So reimagination. So being open-spirited and willing to learn.

The Poached Egg!

This is one reason I am so excited that – for the first time in my life – I poached an egg today. Four times. I have always substituted scrambled, or easy over, or easy over failure becoming involuntarily scrambled!

But today I was committed to the recipe, to something new, to learning. The result, I would say, was unqualified success. It didn’t hurt that I served the poached egg on a toasted English muffin, with smoked salmon and this amazing aïoli sauce I had to make on the side.

My other example is these two images I captured the other day (downtown and then our neighborhood – you can see more next Photo-Friday).

I took the photographs from the middle of the street, while in my car. So we are talking here about “point of view.” Sometimes we fail to see things because we never try – or even imagine – observing from a different point of view. We are often unwilling, or it can be too costly, or maybe we simply never think to change the place where we stand.

Regardless, there is so much for us to learn simply by moving a few feet to the left… or to the right… or turning 180-degrees… or standing on a stepladder… or asking the people around us what it is that they see.

Socrates’ open mind threatened his society, so he was executed for “impiety and corrupting youth.”

Closed minds (especially those that know better but take the path of obduracy in order to gain power) are the real danger to faith and democracy, dangerous to life itself; Jesus completed his earlier thought with this sobering conclusion.

 But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!

Jesus – Matthew 12:23

In the sure knowledge that the love and light of Jesus lead to truth, and that the truth will always set us free – DEREK