Malcolm Muggeridge was a fascinating Englishman.

And while in Muggeridge’s homeland, I thought it fitting to bring you a deep thought from him. (Actually, there are two Englishmen in today’s deep thought, one building upon the observation of another…)

Muggeridge was, among other things, a journalist and writer. A media personality at the birth of television. A soldier in World War II (and reportedly a spy as well). Most fascinating, he brought worldwide attention to the work of Mother Teresa.

If you watched the AWAKEN sermon from yesterday’s post, you’d have heard me introduce Muggeridge and refer to one of his favorite quotations taken from a William Blake poem:

This life’s dim Windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, and not thro’, the Eye.

It was that last bit about seeing seeing with the eye vs. seeing through it. I think there’s more than poetry in those words. Muggeridge explains this further:

Jesus himself makes the same distinction as Blake between what is seen with and through the eye when he directs his teaching specifically to those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. It is not enough, that is to say, just to look and listen; behind looking and listening there has to be the perspective of faith. Only seeing through the eye, and across this perspective, does the true significance of Jesus and his teaching become clear. … It was those luminous words of his, sealed with his death on the Cross, that led to his being recognized as God. After all, who but God would have dared to ask of men what he asked of them? Demanding everything and enduring everything, he set in train a great creative wave of love and sacrifice such as the world had never before seen or dreamed of.  [Seeing Through the Eye. pg. 11]

What do you think it means to see through the eye, instead of with the eye? What is the difference?