Now we see through a glass darkly, then we shall see face to face.

1 Corinthians 13:12

A few weeks ago, on our monthly family trip to Costco, my son tried to reach out and grab a lizard on one of the ultra-high definition TVs. I was as surprised as he was when his little hand hit the sparkly, clean screen; he’s seen TVs before, there’s little he loves more than when he and his sister get half an hour of cartoons while I make dinner. But as I tried to wipe his little finger smudges off this enormous store display, I saw where he was coming from. Even up close, the images were alarmingly clear, almost too clear, my eyes struggling with the glossy way everything seemed to move, and the thousands of moving fibers visible on every leaf. 

Last night, I was talking to a dear friend of mine who is a photographer about this and she affirmed that I wasn’t losing my mind when I said the picture was too clear. She explained that, at some point, digital cameras started capturing more details than we can with human eyes, and that while that can create incredible photography (and toddler-fooling lizards) it also has some weird knock-on effects. She told me that its current standard practice for portrait photographers to go back and strategically slightly blur people’s faces, not just as a touch up, or to make their complexion nicer, but because a camera actually captures more details of a human face than our eyes do, so when the images are presented as captured, they don’t really look right, because that’s just not what those faces look like to the human eye. 

Human eyes aren’t limited by some kind of technical deficiency, it’s not that we couldn’t see more clearly, plenty of animals do, but by evolutionary choice. At some point in our ancient history, it stopped serving us to have any better eyesight, and energy went elsewhere. Whatever new information gained in seeing every pore and hair on those around us wasn’t worth what it took to see it. So now, when we see that detail, it’s actually hard to look at, it becomes more difficult to recognize loved ones, see the nuance of facial expression, make quick decisions, because there’s too much detail that we don’t need, and it makes it harder to understand what you’re really looking at. 

In seminary, we did a lifeboat exercise in one of my classes. This is one of those classic ethical reasoning exercises where they tell you a ship is sinking and there is a lifeboat that will only hold a few people, and then they give you a list of few-word descriptions of the dozen or so people on board (5-year-old child, retired surgeon, mother of three). You then pick who should be on the lifeboat, and who gets left to sink. 

I remember some of my classmates immediately treating the exercise like it was a riddle, an escape room that would free them if they pushed enough buttons and pulled enough letters. They started peppering our professor, 

“Well, is the electrical engineer a Christian?” 

“The beloved grandpa, how old is he, does he have any terminal illnesses?” 

“This says if we try to put extra people on the lifeboat, it will be too heavy and sink – shouldn’t both kids count as only the weight of one adult?” and my personal favorite, 

“We’ll just have people rotate between being on the lifeboat and holding on to the side.” 

To which my professor promptly responded, “Well, the fingernails of someone holding on cut a small hole in the lifeboat, it deflated and everyone died. Congratulations.”  

I got where my professor was coming from, I struggled not to get frustrated as well. It’s not a riddle where if you ask enough questions a detail will reveal itself that will make it obvious what the “right” answer is, more details doesn’t always make the truth clearer, and at some point, it actually becomes harder to understand what you’re looking at. 

We are in an age where data is more available than ever before, where we can find more information about more things faster than any civilization ever before has had the power to. Has it made us wiser? Have we understood the world better for it? Or in seeing every pore, every both-sides, every possible detail in high-definition, have we actually lost the ability to understand what we see? 

What if what we needed wasn’t more information, but the wisdom to step back, consider our core beliefs and values, and just make the best calls we knew to make? What if more information at some point, stops providing clarity, and starts creating confusion? 

This week, my challenge to you as faith leaders is, when a difficult question presents itself, to resist the urge to immediately google it, to ask ChatGPT, to go searching for more information. Not because learning, knowledge, and context don’t matter, they do, but because sometimes you need to trust what your own eyes see for a while, sometimes we need to remind ourselves of what the Spirit, and our biology has led us to be able to see. 

Now we see through a glass [too sharply], then we will see face to face.