Blindness in Seeing a Society
Mark 10:46-52
Illustration
by Jacques Lusseyran

Jacques Lusseyran survived the WWII Nazi Concentration Camps. After the war he became a college Professor. His story is all the more interesting because he survived and accomplished all this blind. He says, "Something has astonished me for a long time. It is that blind people never speak about the things they see. At least I never hear them talk about them to those who see with their physical eyes.

Rather often, however, when blind people are together, suddenly they tell each other what they perceive. Then why do they ordinarily keep quiet about this?

I think that basically the reason is rather simple. They keep quiet because of society. To live in society one must at any cost resemble everyone else.  Society demands it. In order to adapt to the world of seeing, blind people are obliged to declare themselves unable to see and, believe me, I know what I'm talking about, for that has happened to me even when I knew very well that it didn't correspond to reality and was not true."

Parabola Books, What One Sees Without Eyes, by Jacques Lusseyran