On May 25, 2001 Erik Weihenmayer summited the highest peak on Earth. Hundreds of people have stood atop Mount Everest since Sir Edmund Hillary’s first ascent in 1953, but Weihenmayer stands out in this prestigious group by being completely blind. So, I guess we can assume that he didn’t make the climb for the view. In fact, he says that people who climb mountains just for the pretty view should buy themselves a nice picture and save themselves two-and-a-half months of work. He, on the other hand, climbs mountains for the challenge of it, the skill required to achieve a goal. And instead of gazing at the amazing expanse of land all around him when he gets to the top, he listens to the sound of space, reaches down and touches the snow, and enjoys an internal vista that no photograph could ever hope to convey.
But I have a hard time imagining myself crossing the street without being able to see. How could a blind man climb a mountain that can be deadly under the best conditions? At least eight people have died climbing Mount Everest every year since 1953, and at least 120 bodies have never been recovered from its slopes. So Weihenmayer, who wanted to actually make the climb instead of being carried up there and dumped like a sack, had to trust senses other than sight with his life. His hearing became his most important sense. As his team members led the way up the mountain, they would ring a bell or bang an ice ax and Weihenmayer would follow the sound. To find good footholds, he would tap his tool against the ice. Depending on the “thunk” that he heard, he would know if that area was safe to step in. He also stayed clear of deep crevasses by paying close attention to sounds being reflected off of what was around him. If he couldn’t hear any echoes, he knew not to go any farther. By relying on his acute hearing, and by regarding his blindness as a challenge to be overcome instead of a disability, Weihenmayer was able to reach the top of Mount Everest, which boasts a view that reaches farther than the eye can see.
Those of us who live in a world of vision can hardly fathom having to do without it. So many daily activities, from driving to playing most sports, become impossible without the ability to see. And we are bombarded by visual stimuli, from the billboards on the side of the road to the body language that we use to communicate what words cannot. We treasure our sight, with good reason, and we will go to great lengths—spending small fortunes on eye exams, glasses, contact lenses, and even laser eye surgery—to keep it functioning at its best. We live in a visual world, and we are nothing more than visual people.
We even use the word “blind” as an insult. If you don’t believe me, go to a sporting event and listen for the most common insult aimed at the referees. “Blind” people—or people we dub “blind” even though they technically have fully functioning eyeballs—are people who ignore obvious details, or are too stupid to see the truth when it is right in front of them. The word “blind” is also used as an insult against people of faith. “How can you blindly do what some old man tells you?” is a question I have heard many times throughout my life. The question doesn’t bother me. I accept that I can’t prove my faith to anyone else. What does bother me is when I hear some people of faith react against this question by saying that their faith isn’t blind at all. When they are asked to explain themselves, they talk about “feelings” or “assurances” they’ve had—words that are not associated with seeing at all, but some other sense entirely—and fail to prove how their faith isn’t blind.
We read repeatedly in scripture how faith is, and has to be, blind. Paul teaches that faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), and Alma defines it as the “hope for things which are not seen” (Alma 32:21). If we saw the being we exercise faith in, we wouldn’t need faith any longer. We would know, and that would be it. But there is still something about the word “blind” that we don’t like. We feel that if we concede the point and admit that we are exercising blind faith, we are less than those people who are ridiculing us, that we are somehow stupider. This is probably because they are not using the word “blind” to mean the inability to see, but to mean a weak mind. To them, blind is synonymous with stupid. So, when we are accused of blindly submitting our wills to God, we are really being accused of stupidly submitting our wills to God, without any thought whatsoever. Though I accept that faith is blind—most of us haven’t seen God, and won’t before we die—stupid it is not. In fact, just as Erik Weihenmayer’s hearing became more acute as he relied on it during his many climbs, those who exercise faith soon develop another sense on top of the five physical senses. This sense helps them become more sensitive to the reality of the world around them. Instead of closing them off to the world, it allows them to understand it as it really is.
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As the APs drove us over the Benjamin Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia into the New Jersey Cherry Hill Mission, the one in the passenger seat, Elder Kerr, turned around to ask us greenies if any of us had played sports in high school.
“Yeah, I played football for four years,” I replied.
“At the end of every day you should feel like you did after football practice,” he said.
I didn’t fully believe him. Missionaries wear white shirts and ties. Their hair is neatly combed all day, and they have to be sure to keep a crisp shine on their black shoes. They don’t do Down-Ups until sweat pours into their eyes and their muscles feel like they are going to burn through their skin. They don’t do tackling drills on weed infested fields that used to be grass, but haven’t been watered in months. And they don’t get so dirty and sweaty that they feel like they need to go through some sort of ritualistic cleansing before they could rejoin society, like I did after football practice. I didn’t think that missionary work would be easy—I believed all those people who told me that it is the hardest two years of their lives—but it couldn’t possibly be like football practice.
My notions of missionary work—notions gathered from movies like Called to Serve and God’s Army—were quickly changed when I got to my first area, New Brunswick, New Jersey. I arrived with my trainer, Elder Torres, at our apartment in the early afternoon. Since Elder Torres was from Mexico, and I was a Spanish speaking missionary, I decided that I would only speak to him in Spanish. I made a feeble attempt to ask him if I could unpack my things. From what I understood of his reply, I would do that later. First, we would get to work.
I didn’t have a bike, a helmet or a backpack yet, so I had to use the extra bike and helmet in the apartment. The bike was a heavy hunk of black-painted metal with two wheels. It creaked and groaned every time I pushed down on the pedals, and the gears were non-functional. The helmet was multiple sizes too big for me, and the only way I could get it to stay on was by twisting it until it was wedged on my head almost completely sideways.
We kneeled for prayer, opened the door, letting in the humid July, New Jersey air, mounted our bikes and started riding out to New Brunswick, which was five miles north of our apartment in North Brunswick. We rode along Route 1, and between keeping my helmet on my head and keeping my shoulder bag out of the way of my pumping knees, I had only one hand on the handlebars at any given time. As we turned the corner onto Livingston Avenue to make our final approach into the city, I didn’t feel anymore like the tough guy who had endured four years of football, taken and given hits, and caught passes. I felt more like a child, trying on his older brother’s pads without permission.
That first day we tracted Lewis Street. As we were teaching a man named Luis from Peru, Elder Torres looked to me to teach the final principle of the lesson, how Luis could know for himself that the Book of Mormon was true. I opened my scriptures and found the first verses in Moroni that I had marked. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Moroni 10:3-5. It was from Moroni 7, about charity. Luis read the verses, then went off on an unintelligible rant—at least unintelligible to me—waving his hand above his head and pounding his chest. Elder Torres salvaged the lesson, and we left with an appointment to come back in a few days. I was too timid to ask what the rant was about and Elder Torres never told me.
Later we visited a part-member family and watched Together Forever. I gladly welcomed the break, the half hour in which I wouldn’t have to do anything but sit and look at the TV screen. By the time the movie was over, it was dark and time for me and my companion to ride the five miles back to our apartment. My thighs burned as I pumped the pedals of my bicycle up the hill to North Brunswick. I felt my white shirt cling to my back and arms, grime and sweat between the collar and my neck.
Once we got home I threw myself onto my bed, not caring that I was soiling the sheets.
The next day, we opened the door, faced the humidity, rode into town, taught people I had no hope of understanding, met with members I also had no hope of understanding, and rode home after dark. My first Saturday in the field, I was told that I would be giving a fifteen minute talk the next day. Two months before, I had given a talk to my home ward in English and I hadn’t taken fifteen minutes. How was I supposed to last that long in Spanish? I got through it by reading from many long passages of scripture, though with all my fumbling over the foreign words, I can only hope that someone understood my message. At the other meetings, I would strain to understand what was being said, and many of the members asked Elder Torres why his companion was so mad all the time. I guess my strain manifested itself on my face as a furrowed brow.
I was miserable. I couldn’t teach the gospel, I couldn’t learn Spanish, and I couldn’t talk to my companion because I couldn’t express with this new language the agony I was in. Many times in those first few weeks in New Jersey I contemplated calling my mission president to beg him to send me to an English area or send me home. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could go through this.
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“Es la hora de irnos,” Elder Torres announced after our hour lunch break. We had already spent the morning riding frantically around the city to meet with people I didn’t feel capable of helping, and I was enjoying the one moment of peace I could find in the field, a brief lunchtime nap. At my companion’s call, I moaned and mentally prepared myself for the hell that awaited me on the other side of the door. As I rolled my body off the couch, a thought flashed through my head. I’d rather die right now than have to go out there again. It was only there for a millisecond, a mere blink, but it was there. Of course it was melodramatic, but maybe my notion of missionary work was melodramatic. I had heard since primary how the missionaries were like the army of Helaman, marching as to war. So, is it any mystery why I secretly wanted the kind of glory I imagined in battle? To get it all over with in one epic confrontation? The day by day struggles of the Lord’s work was not what I expected, and I wasn’t sure if I liked it. But there was no battle to go to. I would have to endure. The Lord wasn’t asking me to die for Him...unfortunately.
I kneeled beside my companion as he prayed, climbed to my feet, took my helmet from my bike’s handlebars—I had bought one that fit me by this time—and snapped it on. Elder Torres opened the door and I winced as the heat and the humidity invaded our apartment. Then, we rolled our bikes out into the bright afternoon sun. As we rode through our apartment complex, I wondered if I could make it through another day. I felt like some sort of end was going to come that day. That I would prove an unprofitable servant before the sun set.
So, as we turned the corner onto Route 1, I did the only thing I could do. I cried out to the only person I was capable of talking to. “Heavenly Father,” I silently prayed, “please just let me get through this one day. I’ll worry about tomorrow later, but please just give me the strength to make it to the end of the day.” I closed my prayer, pushed down on my pedal, and had one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.
All of the turmoil inside of me suddenly dissipated, like the raging storm on the Sea of Galilee that the Savior calmed. Comfort, like the comfort of the big quilt your mother made for you when you were a kid, wrapped around me, and the words, “Everything is going to be all right,” blossomed in my mind. I can’t say that I heard them with my physical ears, but I detected them in some other way. With a different sensory organ. Something internal. Something spiritual. Something like faith.
As I raised my head, my eyes watering, I saw no difference in my situation. The sun was still beating down on me, my shirt still clung to my skin, my calloused hands still gripped my handlebars, my legs still ached from the strain of pedaling my rickety bike, and the cars on Route 1 were still screaming by, oblivious to the life-changing experience that had occurred inside one of those weird guys in white shirts and ties riding along the side of the road. But there was a difference that I couldn’t see, that no one could see. It was something that transcends sight or hearing, or anything else physical that we base so much of our lives on. It was the assurance that, no matter what happens, someone was aware of me, was looking after me, and would take me out of the furnace once I had become sufficiently purified.
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Faith, the first and most basic principle of religion, but also the most profound, can be considered a sense, just like the five physical senses. A faith sense. Jesus once compared the Spirit, that elusive thing that we detect with our faith sense, to the wind that “bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth” (John 3:8). In the Old Testament, it is described as a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). And just as your tongue is the only organ on your body that can taste, and your ear the only organ that can hear, this faith sense is the only part of you that can detect these stirrings, this divine communication. Confusing the faith sense with one of the physical senses would be as silly as holding a fragrant rose up to your ear or trying to taste spaghetti by sticking your hand into a steaming plateful of it.
Now, I’m not saying here that we all just need to close our eyes and let ourselves go into some kind of cosmic trust-fall or something. What I’m saying is that God wants us to recognize that we are already blind—cannot see with out eyes things of the Spirit. If we don’t recognize that we will never rely on Him. When the Pharisees asked Jesus if they were blind, he responded by saying, “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth” (John 9:41). So the offence is not being blind, but saying that we see. After all, we are admonished, “Dispute not because ye see not” (Ether 12:6). Jesus also calls this same group “blind leaders of the blind” (Matt. 15:14). They were like the spiritual referees of their day, and they thought they could call the game even though they were walking around in sunglasses, tapping their spiritual white canes in front of them, just like everyone else. They thought they could see, but they couldn’t recognize the One they had been waiting two thousand years for because he had no “beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). All they saw was the carpenter’s son. A peasant. The only person who could actually see the truth, the only person who had the power to lead all us blind people groping our way through life was right there, calling out to them, but they didn’t take His hand. Instead, they continued to insist that they weren’t blind, that they didn’t need the help, and they kept taking step after step toward the ditch.
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When Zeus and his wife, Hera, were having one of their many tiffs, they consulted Tiresias to settle the dispute. Tiresias sided with Zeus and in her anger, Hera cursed the old man with blindness. As a consequence, Tiresias developed the gift of prophecy, the ability to see things as they were, as they are, and as they will be. Some accounts of the story say that Zeus gave him this gift because of his pricked conscience—it was, after all, his marital strife that had gotten Tiresias involved in the first place, and he was too afraid to anger his wife even more by undoing her curse—but maybe it was something that he gained on his own. One of the ways that he could predict the future was by listening to the songs of the birds, birds that had always been there, singing their same old songs. But maybe he had been too busy looking at the shiny stuff all around to listen to what they were telling him. Once his eyes were forever darkened, he could hear and understand their music.
When Tiresias finally passed into Hades’s realm, he was the only mortal to keep the gifts of speech and understanding. The disembodied spirits floating around the Styx couldn’t function without their physical senses anymore. The only way they had been able to interpret the world had been through taste, touch, hearing, smell, and sight. But without their tongues, skin, ears, noses, and eyes, they were senseless, moaning phantoms. Tiresias, on the other hand, had already developed the sense of his spirit when he was still in the body. He had learned to listen and understand the world through his spirit, so when he was without his body, he was the same old blind prophet, helping guys like Odysseus find their way home.
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A few months before I turned in my mission papers, my best friend was called to serve in Fiji. This was around the time when The Other Side of Heaven was the biggest thing since Johnny Lingo, so I was sure that I’d be called to some exotic place. I had lived a good life, kept all the commandments and such, and now it was time for God to reward me by giving me a mission that they could make a major motion picture about. I could just see it: me dressed all in white, taking an islander by his arms as the emerald blue waves crashed around us. It was what I had always dreamed of, and was one of the reasons why I wanted to serve a mission in the first place.
Great was my surprise though, when God rang my guiding bell over New Jersey. There had to have been some mix up. No one wanted to hear about a missionary serving in New Jersey. No one even wanted to be in New Jersey. It was just the no-man’s-land between New York and Philadelphia. Nothing important happened in New Jersey.
But, despite my initial reaction, I blindly started stepping toward the sound of the bell. I accepted the call, and accepted it with my whole heart—which took some convincing. At the time, I couldn’t see or hear Orlando Lopez, Juan Ramos, or Lourdes Reyes, or any of the other people I would come to know and love, people who would experience the most important events of their lives there in obscure towns somewhere between New York and Philadelphia. Nor could I see the life changing experience that would solidify my relationship with the Almighty, but something besides sight, that faith sense which was just an emerging bud at that time, told me New Jersey was were I needed to be. That was where I would help others understand God’s plan for them, and where I would come to understand it myself.
I cannot overestimate how important my faith sense was to me then. It urged me to go where the Lord wanted me to go, to seek His help to learn a new tongue, to knock on doors till my knuckle was aching, to keep pedaling my bike even though I had sweat in my eyes and my thighs felt like they were going to burn through my skin, and to wear myself ragged more than I had ever done in my life. But more importantly, it sent me to my knees so many times that they became calloused in an effort to keep a blind relationship alive.
I am thinking of my senses, and how much my actions are affected by each one. When I smell smoke, I check the kitchen for something burning. When I hear sirens behind me, I pull to the side of the road. When I see frost on the grass, I dress for the cold. But I am surprised to realize how much I base my life on my faith sense. I give up ten percent of my income, even though I can clearly see by my budget that I am barely making ends meet; I read ancient books, looking for a bit of wisdom to apply to my daily life in our modern world, even thought the men who wrote them died centuries before cars, DVDs and iPods; I voluntarily give up three hours of my weekend for spiritual council and instruction, even though I have a pile of homework that needs doing; and I kneel beside my bed every night and morning, confident that the thoughts and intents of my heart are not sputtering out as I think them in my head, even though I can’t see anyone in the room to hear them.
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For the past two years I’ve taught Spanish to the new missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. When I teach the missionaries how to give directions in Spanish, I like to take them out into the walkways between all the buildings and do a practice activity. One companion gets blindfolded while the other has to direct him using only Spanish as they follow me around the MTC campus. “Izquierda,” they will say—left—or “derecha,”—right. The point of the activity is to help the missionaries associate the directions with the Spanish words without having to think of the English translation first. I try not to go too fast because I don’t want anyone to run into the poles that hold up the awning over the walkways. The MTC hallways aren’t as treacherous as the slopes of Everest, but it’s best to take it easy and stay safe. But the missionaries will inevitably get competitive.
“Rápido,” they say—faster. “Rápido. ¡Rápido!”
And the most amazing thing isn’t that these missionaries expect their companions to start running blindfolded, even though there are unseen hazards all around them. The amazing thing is that the missionaries wearing the blindfolds start running. They put all their trust in their companion’s faltering Spanish, and run. They don’t stop to uncover their eyes for a moment so that they can get a sense for where they are going (which is against the rules). They don’t demand that their companion take them by the hand (which is also against the rules). And they don’t argue about the absurdities of running in a busy walkway without being able to see (which is not against the rules, and would probably be the safer course of action).
They follow the voice of him who sees to the end of their journey, and sees the obstacles they face. When he says to go right, they go right. When he says to go left, they go left. And when he says to run, they run.