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This was the beginning of numerous examinations and operations, followed by loss of sight in the left eye, and then the right. By 1983, at age 48, all sensations of light had disappeared.
During the next three years, Hull, professor of religious education at the University of Birmingham, kept an audio-journal of his new life of darkness. The journal became a book, Touching the Rock (Pantheon Books, 1990), a beautiful and remarkable portrayal of what it is like to be blind.
Few matters escape Hull's probing. He records his altered perceptions of time and space; how rain "describes" an environment; the irrelevancy of smiling; the problems of socializing; the effects of blindness on food and sex; the art of seeing with a cane.
There is "the horror of being faceless, of forgetting one's own appearance," and the terrible frustration with blindness in his familial relationships. "Oh Daddy," his daughter, aged ten-and-a-half, says, "I wish you could see me."
Early in his blindness Hull is oppressed by the image of being stuck in a coal-truck in a mine shaft, trundled further and further inside the mountain while the round circle of daylight behind him gets smaller and smaller. The train refuses to stop; he has not even "the slightest pinprick of light" to orientate himself. He is trapped.
As a religious man, Hull's examination of the deeper meaning of his loss begins with the premises of Christianity. What is a blind person to do with the powerful archetype of light which pervades language, thought and faith, as in the assertion of I John l:5, "God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all"?
The author of Psalm 139, Hull is certain, must have been blind, so perfectly does it express the situation of the blind person before God. Meditating on this psalm gives Hull a glimpse of reality beyond sight/light: "Darkness and light are both alike to Thee."
Hull's mourning eases as time passes, but he must still confront a question he has resisted: "Could blindness be a gift?" He fights towards the answer, not stoically, but by "minute steps". When he reaches "I accept the gift," he records, "I felt that I was in the very presence of God."
The book's last journal entry finds Hull exploring Iona Abbey late at night. (During the day, "kind-hearted people" give him so much help he can't take anything in.) He works his way around the huge marble altar, examines it with his hands, measures it with his body. Much of the stone is polished and smooth, but he also discovers "something more primitive": long irregularities, depressions and abrasions.
This "extraordinary" contrast provides the metaphor for Hull's autobiography of adversity. Exploring life's imperfections, he touches something of "the naked heart of the rock".
Dora Dueck is a writer and a member of Jubilee Mennonite Fellowship in Winnipeg.
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