A Look in the Mirror

I ran across the 2006 story of Joyce Urch last week during a brief study of modern day miracles. Blinded by a hereditary illness 26 years previously, Joyce had lived amongst 5 kids, 12 grandkids, and 3 great-grandkids, some of whom she had known only by sound or touch. Rushed to the hospital with tremendous pain on an early January day in 2006, she was afraid she was about to lose not only all whom she loved but even her life. A few days after her admittance, Mrs. Urch suffered a serious heart attack and was nearing kidney failure; doctors did not expect her to live. It was only after a lifesaving operation and an unlikely recovery that Joyce was able to open her eyes again, a feat that shocked the entire family—herself included. Mrs. Urch woke up seeing.

Her husband describes the stunned reactions of a family indelibly marked by blindness suddenly given the gift of sight. At first he didn't believe her frenetic bedside declarations—"I can see! I can see!" He immediately asked her what color sweater he was wearing. "She leaned forward," said Mr. Urch, "and she just looked at me and said, 'Haven't you got old.' And I said, 'Wait 'til you have a look in the mirror.'"

In a Clinical Pastoral unit of pastoral counseling, we were required to examine the stages of human development and the principle crises each stage begets in the life of an individual. For many of us, understanding particular life events in the context of the stage of development in which they occurred compelled new depths for self-reflection. The loss of a parent, for instance, during the critical stage when trust or mistrust is developed suggests that trust may be an area of impact and concern. As I peered reflectively and retrospectively at each of these stages in my own life, I found myself startled at the clearer images in front of myself. Yet, looking closely in these mirrors, the images were not always immediately recognizable.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to look in a mirror after fifty years of knowing my face by touch and imagination alone. Just as I would be startled by my own likeness after an absence of self-reflection, Joyce Urch notes the difficulty of learning to recognize the stranger in the mirror. She said she is learning to see herself and the world around her—again.

In the striving of self-reflection and in the wake of existential wrestling, I similarly learn to see again and again. Arguably, like Joyce, I am learning to see myself again for the first time. In many ways, each developmental stage in my life places the same task before me all over again, though perhaps in new light: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here?

Seldom do I fail to recall a time marked by restlessness in the stages of human development, a yearning for answers amidst turmoil or confusion. For many, it is the tender age of adolescence; for others it is the inquisitive years of college, the emptiness of a midlife crisis, the vulnerability of life in the aging lane. Though looking back at these formative events from infancy to adulthood is like looking at a picture I don't want to recognize, upon opening my ever drooping eye lids, I discover that I now am able to see what was there all along: another figure in the reflection standing beside me, the God who was there even when I was sure I was alone. J.R.R. Tolkien's words offer a telling picture for those convinced at what they do not see: "The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it."

The stages and crises of development that most transform me are stages that inherently seem to bid me to ask the existential questions I was somehow meant to ask all along. To understand why a particular trauma of adolescence or lesson of young adulthood shaped me the way it did may be wearisome or frustrating, but in my attempts to revisit the formative nature of these years, I just may find myself treading on holy ground.

As Joseph learned on his way from the pit to the throne, the God who startles me is Lord even over the process.