My wife Frankie and I were out at the West Rim of the Grand Canyon recently, looking at the amazing artistic handiwork. It is almost too vast for my puny mind to wrap itself around. I cannot see the depth and width because my eyes cannot adjust to the phenomenal distances with clarity. It is almost like I am staring at a two dimensional photo of the canyon and not actually there because my mind cannot adjust properly.
Frankie's hobby is photography and she is experimenting with different filters on the lens of her camera as she takes the pictures of the canyon. Some have a blue hue, some greenish, yellow, and orange. Each hue gives the canyon an different look, a different flavor from the other. Each hue brings out certain rock colors, or sky colors and it dims other colors. Each hue makes a different picture of the same majestic view.
While she was taking a picture she handed me her sunglasses and I noticed her lenses are yellowish where mine are tinted in black. I took mine off and put hers on and a whole new world opened up to me. Colors I had not seen before jumped out at me, certain crevasses became clear and beautiful.
St. Augustine did battle with people in his community that thought you had to put your intelligence on a shelf when you set about to believe in God. That belief suspended intelligence and reason. His argument was that we needed to believe in order that we could understand. That reason is dependent on your beliefs, or ... on which pair of sunglasses you put on. We all see the world through a pair of tinted lenses and we can choose which color they are. Augustine said, "credo put intelligens" which means: I believe in order that I might understand. He chose a pair of glasses to understand the world.
When you look at the Grand Canyon do you see the handiwork of a creator God smiling as he finished the last touch with his paintbrush, do you see the results of billions of years of erosion and upheaval, or do you have a color somewhere between the two? What is the tint you have on your lens?