I used to work at Trader Joe's when I lived in Minneapolis. One day at work, I saw a man, probably about sixty, who'd lost an eye: like, that morning. There was gauze over the empty space where the eye had been. The gauze was taped
at the brow, temple and cheekbone, but it was loose and askew. There were faint
blotches of blood on the gauze that really seemed to advertise the wound more than
conceal it. I had the familiar sensation of something ghastly beckoning me to look at it, the
way road-kill does when I have to drive right over it. There's some morbid draw that pulls at my eyes like a magnet toward tiny organs and bones and torn flesh, and I have to pass my eyes over it quickly to
resist it. It didn't help that I'd just finished King Lear with the homeschool kids I taught, so that the image of a wandering, blinded, old man carried all kinds of tragic, Shakespearean overtones. I couldn’t stop
the brooding curiosity that flooded my mind. Was the bandage askew because he
couldn’t see that it was askew? The carelessness of the bandage gave the
impression of it being there as a token courtesy to others because an eye that isn’t
there cannot look with disgust on it’s own absence. He had another eye though,
so of course, he could have seen it. Perhaps, I thought indignantly, it was the shoddy work of some heartless nurse, who hadn't even the respect to properly bandage a man's wounds and shield him from prying eyes...like...mine. All this intrusive wondering went on in the time it took for my spine to shiver with repulsion as we passed in the frozen aisle.
I was working cheese that morning, and to be honest, I was hoping he wouldn't come near me. I was already mentally exhausted from our first split-second encounter. Nonetheless, he ambled over to the deli meat section right next to me where he stood briefly, considering the rosemary ham while I knelt before the dairy case, arranging triangular stacks of Brie and aged Parmesan. Because of the looseness of the bandage and my vantage point, to the side of him and below, I was at the perfect angle to see the space where his eye had been. I tried to resist, failed, and stole a couple quick, horrified glances. It looked like that part of his face had been taken out with an ice cream scoop. I pictured his surgeon hitching up his sleeve to the elbow the way the guy at the ice cream shop always does before plunging his hand down in.
Later, I was on register, and of
course, he came through my line. He set a loaf of multigrain bread, a can of
turkey chili and a box of English breakfast tea on the absurdly small ledge
Trader Joe’s supplies its customers for unloading their groceries. A bachelor
basket, I thought. I imagined him at home in front of the stove, stirring his pot of turkey chili, the gauze over his eye, or worse, the gauze not over his eye, taking it to the
living room, sinking into his reclining chair, and eating his chili alone and eyeless, glad for his
loneliness for once since it meant no one staring at him and his one eye.
He
pulled me from the downward spiral of my pitiful thoughts by cheerfully asking me how I was today. He
said he loved Trader Joe’s but lived too far away to come often. He said he was
coming in to the cities more often lately because he’d had his eye out at the
VA hospital, and he made sure to stop by Trader Joes every time he had an
appointment. He said they’d caught something just in time, and that he was
really very lucky. He said that he loved this fall weather, and pointed out the
windows to the trees that were burnished gold and very beautiful. He thanked me
and wished me a good rest of my shift. He was one of the more grateful people
I’d met in a while. I have both my eyes, but hadn’t seen much to be happy about
for a while.
That man got me to thinking about something Jesus said, probably one of his better known horrifying, distasteful statements that he seemed to so enjoy tossing out. He says, if your eye causes you
to sin, you should pluck it out. He said it was better to enter Heaven with one
eye than to be cast into Hell with both eyes in tact. He also said, if your arm
causes you to sin cut it off because it’s better to enter Heaven with one arm than to have two pretty arms in Hell. I paraphrase.
There was that hiker a while back who
got his arm pinned under a boulder while he was hiking alone in the middle of
nowhere, and eventually sawed his arm off with his pocketknife. They made a
movie about it with James Franco, (which, coincidentally, I'd watched just weeks before meeting the man with one eye). It wasn’t until the hiker was absolutely sure
he would die if he didn’t cut his arm off that he made the decision to do it.
The movie was called 127 hours; that was how long it took him to decide to cut
his own arm off, almost six days. It would seem that only death is worse than hacking off your own arm. I
wonder how long it would take someone to decide to gouge their own eye out. My guess is more than 127 hours.
Dismemberment is pretty grotesque stuff for the Son of God to be chatting to people about, or for a priest to be sermonizing about, and I remember hearing that passage in Catholic church when I was young, and being terrified. Most older people, I think, decide Jesus must be exaggerating,
or "speaking figuratively," which is another way of saying exaggerating, another
way of saying It’s alright folks! He’s not really saying what it sounds like
he’s saying. Don’t be scared. Come on back in. There will be no amputations
this service.
That hiker and the nice man in the
grocery store are the only two people I’ve ever known, or known of, who
voluntarily cut off their arm or plucked out their eye. They did it to save
their lives, not to save their souls. Each loved the rest of his body enough to sacrifice one part to keep it. I think most people would give up one
body part to stay alive, and if they don’t have to cut it off themselves the
choice is even easier. I don’t know a single person who has sacrificed
a member of their body to save their soul. Maybe that’s because the things that
might cause one to stumble can usually be cast off less gruesomely than an arm
or an eye. Maybe arms and eyes are generally behaving themselves these days,
whereas the more common offender tends to be something like, say, a computer, a
relationship, a job, etc. Still, I don’t think Jesus is exaggerating. Even if it’s
only hypothetically, my soul has been dogged by the question I feel Christ asking: which do you value more, your body or your soul? Which do you value more, this fleeting life or the eternal one to come?
As the man with one eye left my line and walked out of the store, I swear I saw, as though a veil had been lifted, just how seriously we humans take our lives and how casually we regard our souls, and I saw how totally, insanely backwards that is. I think Jesus is trying to get us to see that it is our souls we ought to be in a frenzy about while our bodies, he basically says, can be tossed onto the chopping block. If his statement is shocking it is because of how inverted our values are, how much we love, love, love our precious hides. Sin is a boulder pinning us down,
we’re losing blood fast, death is imminent, and if we were whole and unfallen and had the vision and wisdom of God we would feel the identical urgency of that hiker to cut off the offending limb rather than perish. The math would be clear. We don't see it though. We don't recognize the boulder as a boulder. We don't see that we're pinned, and we love our mangled, gangrenous and
unsalvageable arm there under the boulder too much to cut ourselves loose for a life we don't see either, and not seeing don't value. We tend, mistakenly, to believe that our passing mortal life is a thing of enduring eternal value and
our eternal soul, if it gets a thought at all, is a trifle. We are like a snake who’d rather die than part with its skin. A snake prettying up and working out and dressing up to the nine's a skin that's rotting while it suffocates the real, vigorous, and potentially immortal life surging beneath it. The whole thing would be silly if it weren’t so
truly tragic.
