Perception and the Parables

A long-running meditation on this blog and in my most recent book Hunting Magic Eels is the issue of perception in beholding the kingdom of God. Given that interest, I was stuck in my daily Bible reading today how Jesus frames his use of parables in deeply perceptual terms.

For example, after sharing the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, Jesus' disciples ask about why Jesus uses parables in his teaching. In answer, Jesus says the following. Note the perceptual themes:

He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables:

'Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.'

In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it."

The kingdom is right in front of us but we fail to see it. A message is being spoken and we fail to hear it. In fact, the Parable of the Sower itself is a parable about perception. The seed of the kingdom falls upon the heart, but the heart, like the rocky soil, can fail to discern its presence. 

If you've read  Hunting Magic Eels this is the point about "attention blindness," God being the "dancing gorilla" like in the research of the psychologist Daniel Simons. The kingdom can be directly in front of us, clear as day, yet we fail to see it. 

The reason I keep returning to these insights is twofold. First, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels we tend to think that crises of faith are about belief. We have troubling believing in God. But the deeper issue might rather be a problem of perception, having eyes to see and ears to hear. If so, as I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, perception can be shaped by practices of attention. We can spend less time trying to get people to believe in God and more in helping them see God.

Secondly, we also tend to think of Christianity as a moral drama, an effort in moral self-improvement. But what if faith is primarily perceptual? That is, if we could see clearly might moral fruits, like the good soil, follow naturally, of a course? Might our moral struggles be less the outcome of a depraved "sin nature" than in cloudy perception? Basically, I think if we could see ourselves and each other clearly our ability to love would flow more naturally. That we have to "force" love suggests that we might be struggling with deeper perceptual issues.