In Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning Victor Frankl provides an adept analogy for the unknowability of God. Our eyes have a physiological blind spot, where the optic nerve passes through the retina. I remember experiencing this in biology class in high school; maybe you do too. It was an odd experience. They eye just can’t see there, at the source of the connection to the brain. But the truth is that we can’t see the source of our sight. And so it makes sense, Frankl says, that we can’t know the source of our knowing, which is often given the name God.
In the eye, the retina covers the back wall and transmits images to our brain – except for the small place where the “wiring” has to attach, to carry those impulses to the brain. If receptors covered that hole for the optic nerve, we’d “see” in our blind spot, but nothing that we saw anywhere on our retina would get to the brain. We’d be blind, our eyes disconnected from our brain for the sake of ridding ourselves of our blind spot.
Perhaps refusing to accept the unknowablilty of God, we cover over that incapacity, and in doing so blind ourselves to the transcendent in all of life, in all of experience. Re-ligion, this widely read logotherapist says, is – in the literal sense of the word, re-connecting to the spiritual aspect of our lives.
So to the word re-pent we add the word re-ligio: re-connect.
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