“Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”

One of the problems with being (even an armchair) historian, especially one of the biblical periods, is the parallels you see in everyday life. A tragic moment has you whispering, “Gesthemene”... a triumph has you quoting psalms. Being a Buddhist just makes it worse... now you're weird and incomprehensible. But I couldn't help it, as I watched it.

“Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”

We weren't in a Catholic church, we weren't on the banks of the Jordan. We weren't even in one of those sad plastic built-in bathtubs you find in small protestant churches all over middle America. We were in a “Lasik+” eye surgery clinic. My wife had just experienced a miracle so fundamental it appears no fewer than seven times in the synoptic gospels.

My wife was blind, but now she could see. We had, in a matter of minutes, just been baptized into the Church of Humanistic Science.

“I'm sorry, what?!?”

Ok, the thing with Ellen is, she loves drama. The people who say that's an Italian stereotype have never actually lived with an Italian, even one three generations removed from mama Italia. In this particular case, all I really knew was she had contacted our mortgage lender to ask if we could perhaps get our monthly payments reduced. Now I knew, as I watched her on the phone, that something had happened. I just wasn't sure what.

And you don't ask. If you ask, it goes like this:

Me: “What do you mean, what... what's going on?!?”

Ellen: [throwing hands down, like she's slapping an annoying toddler. The look in her eye says the toddler is, of course, me.]

Me: “No, really... what's going on?!?”

Ellen: [rolls eyes, puts phone on shoulder], “what the fuck is your problem?!? Can't you see I'm on the phone?!?”

So, like the well-trained spouse of an Italian American Yankee that I am, I wait patiently. Peasants do not demand information from Their Empress. Their Empress will bequeath knowledge to them as it is required, and not before.

The phone is hung up. This being opera, we can't just start talking, we must wait until the overture is done, the applause faded to the background.

Ellen: “You remember when I asked about lowering our mortgage payment?”

Scott: [like I said, you can almost hear the aria] “um... yes?”

Ellen: “Not only are we getting a lower mortgage, we're getting all our credit card debt paid off. But that's not the best part...”

Swear to God, we really do talk like this. It's like living inside a TV drama. Me, knowing better than to interrupt the aria with a B sharp: “What's the best part?”

Ellen: “We're going to get ten thousand dollars!”

A different time, a different place, a woman sitting beside me in the car only known as “she who shall remain nameless” in my current household. We cash our Pizza Inn paychecks at the Safeway because we can't afford a bank account. We drive two blocks down the street and pull to the side of the road in a convertible more rust than metal, the summer sun beating down on a quiet residential street. Out of the fistfull of cash I've been carrying in one hand, I start handing greenbacks over. “Now, that's one-two-three hundreds for the rent, one-two hundreds for the car, one-two-three twenties for the power and gas... what's left?”

You've come a long way, baby... I couldn't help but think as Ellen and I walked through the door of the clinic. Plain, garden variety office, except along one wall was nothing but glass, behind it a cross between a dentist's office and a hair salon. Except everyone here would lie down.

He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics.

No lab coat here, the doctor wore a simple button-down shirt and slacks. The balding head made him all too human, his two angels done up weirdly in the baggy purple cotton scrubs so familiar to me in my own life with another sort of nurse.

Ellen wasn't first. That honor went to what seemed to be an Indian or Pakistani man accompanied by a very elegant lady who turned out to be his sister.

”I just got this done Wednesday”, she whispered to me, behind the Terminator sunglasses that marked those who didn't wish to harm the miracle they'd been gifted. Whispered from the chair beside me, even though we were separated from the doctor by perhaps two inches of tempered glass, “he wouldn't have done it if I hadn't... I had to drive him here myself!”

And what an amazing thing it was. Not only did you have a student's view of the operating theater, but mounted on the far wall was a television set that allowed you to see exactly what the surgeon was seeing. Two eyelid clamps was all it took to turn a human eye into an abstract thing, more fried egg than visual organ.

An incomprehensibly large piece of hardware, probably in real life no more than finger-sized, was set over the eye, and only as you saw two hands very carefully twisting a knurled knob sideways did you realize what it was for. Sure enough, once the device was removed a tiny clamp delicately moved a piece of the eye aside, like you pull the wrap off a microwave dinner. A few disco-lights later, and it was done. A repeat of the procedure, and all was finished.

”Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”

I wasn't sure I caught it the first time. The only thing I really knew was someone who had probably worn glasses their whole life walked out with a slightly sheepish look, holding in their own hands, gingerly, the glasses that were once a vital part of their lives, now cradled by an adult like they'd discovered a stuffed animal in the attic of their childhood home, after their parents had passed away.

And then it was Ellen's turn. Because of a quirk of biology, she had to utilize a different, older procedure that would preserve more of her cornea, but at the cost of considerably more discomfort. This time, there would be no peeling back of a cellophane cover. Instead, a saline wash pushed aside a light pudding scum fried off by a miracle of science. Repeated exactly once, and it was done. This time, though, I was watching for it.

”Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”

I have never worn glasses in my whole life. I really have no concept of how important such devices can become if they, and they alone, enable the basic human need to see. Living with this onerous burden of a powerful but at the same time fragile construct for three quarters of a lifetime is something I can't even begin to understand.

Or so I thought, until I witnessed two different people, one of whom I knew intimately, suddenly freed of this burden. In the time it takes you to eat a meal, they were transformed from a limping cripple to someone free to run down the sunset. Someone who could wake up and see their child smile without bits of glass in the way. It was, almost literally, beyond my ken.

”Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”

As Westerners, particularly as Americans, we're taught to envy the savage. In a world ruled by cold machines and cold logic and cold, cold fate, we all too often mindlessly put on a pedestal those who have more faith than knowledge, live closer to nature than to science, who worship “no God but God.”

To them I can only say I witnessed, first hand, a primary miracle. Not the miracle of talking to someone on the other side of the world in an instant, not the miracle of traveling faster than the fastest horse, but of the miracle most basic to the human condition. I witnessed a blind person suddenly able to see.

And, unlike so many other sorts of miracles, this one was hard-won by human hands, human minds, human hearts. Tested and tested and re-tested until all the miracle was bled out of it, and people simply wondered how they could save the money for it, instead of wondering at the miracle it was.

I long ago ceased being impressed by the power of a single book, the power of a school, the power of a midrasa, to teach a human being how to be. That God died when I saw His power used for destruction, to slay innocents in the name of a simple, vengeful, powerless being so weak only the death of thousands could attempt to resurrect Him.

Today I saw instead God's real face. The face of humans who stopped long ago trusting what old men insisted was right and instead chose to use the faculties bequeathed to them by a deity, a power, a universe, that wanted nothing more than to build something that could, under its own steam, comprehend it. As grandiose as that seems, it was manifest to me in that simple waiting room, watching someone who feared life without glasses suddenly freed from their shackles.

”Go forth, my child, and sin no more.”