10/24/2026
A few years ago, while going through a series of eye surgeries and facing the possibility of losing my sight, I often thought about my great-grandmother. She had the same condition I have: detached retinas in both eyes. In rural Hungary in the 1970s, there was no treatment available to her. She lost her sight, though she said she could still make out the world as if she were looking through a thick sheet of plastic.
As a child, that image terrified me. I remember going into our greenhouse and pressing my face close to its plastic covering, trying to imagine what she could see. The world was still there. So were the people. But I could no longer make out their faces. Years later, I would think of her when reading about the man Jesus was healing, who could see people but said they looked like trees walking around. He could see something. But he needed another touch.
I don’t remember hearing my great-grandmother lament the loss of her sight. I know now that this doesn’t mean she never grieved it. Perhaps there was much I was too young to notice. What I remember is how she knew her way around her home, how she cooked and baked the most delicious food, and how she continued to care for herself and live alone for many years. But what has stayed with me most is what she said when I told her I was afraid of going blind one day:
“Csabikám, the most dangerous blindness is believing that we already see clearly.”
I have carried those words with me. And the older I get, the more often I find myself asking what I might be failing to see. Someone’s loneliness beneath their silence. The fear behind an angry response. The person I have reduced to the one thing they said that hurt me.
Perhaps the church can be a place where we allow Jesus to touch our eyes again. Where we come together, week after week, willing to discover that there is more to another person than we have understood. Where someone we thought we knew can surprise us, and someone we have overlooked can become dear to us. I hope we can be that kind of community. A place where we help one another see a little more clearly, and where what we begin to see teaches us how to love. (Csaba Osvath)
