Touching the Rock
An Experience of Blindness
Book Edition Details
Summary
In the depths of darkness, John M. Hull finds an extraordinary light. "Touching the Rock" is not just a memoir; it is an odyssey of perception, a deeply moving exploration of life without sight. Hull's transformation from a sighted man to one enveloped by blindness unveils a new world—a world where the familiar becomes strange, where textures speak louder than colors, and where the nuances of human connection are profoundly altered. With a foreword by Oliver Sacks, this account of Hull’s journey is both a poignant meditation and a revelation, offering insights that transcend the experience of blindness to touch on the very essence of human resilience and perception. Prepare to be challenged, enlightened, and forever changed by this compelling narrative.
Introduction
In the summer of 1983, John M. Hull, a respected professor of religious education at the University of Birmingham, began recording his daily experiences on cassette tape. What made these recordings extraordinary was not their academic content, but their intimate documentation of a profound human transformation. Hull was navigating the deepest waters of complete blindness, having lost his sight three years earlier at the age of forty-five. His voice, captured in moments of despair, wonder, and gradual acceptance, would become one of the most honest and illuminating accounts of what it truly means to lose one's sight and find new ways of being in the world. Hull's journey takes us far beyond the mechanical challenges of learning to use a white cane or reading braille. Through his eyes, we witness a fundamental shift in consciousness, a reimagining of relationships, time, space, and identity itself. His background as both a theologian and educator brings unique depth to his observations, as he grapples not only with practical adaptations but with profound questions about faith, meaning, and what it means to be human when one of our most relied-upon senses disappears. From his struggle with depression and isolation to his eventual recognition of blindness as a different way of experiencing reality, Hull's story illuminates the resilience of the human spirit and offers insights into how we might all better understand the nature of perception, dependence, and the various ways of knowing the world around us.
Sinking into Darkness: The Early Journey
The summer of 1983 marked a turning point in Hull's experience of blindness. Having been registered as blind for nearly three years, he now faced the complete disappearance of his final traces of light sensation. This transition from partial to total blindness brought with it a cascade of revelations about how profoundly sight shapes our daily existence. Hull found himself confronting not just the practical challenges of navigation and work, but the deeper psychological terrain of what he termed "sinking" into blindness. His dreams became a battleground where his sighted past wrestled with his blind present, often featuring vivid visual imagery that served as both comfort and torment. The early recordings reveal Hull's struggle with the social awkwardness that blindness creates. Simple interactions became complex negotiations, from accepting offers of help to dealing with well-meaning strangers who insisted on testing whether he was truly blind. He discovered how much of human communication relies on visual cues, noting his growing consciousness of every smile he gave, uncertain whether it would be returned or even seen. The automatic reciprocity of sighted interaction had vanished, leaving him to navigate social situations with careful deliberation rather than natural ease. Perhaps most poignantly, Hull began to grapple with the gradual fading of visual memories, particularly of his loved ones' faces. He described the horror of realizing he was beginning to forget what his wife Marilyn and daughter Imogen looked like, despite his determination to preserve these precious images. The people in his life began to divide into two categories: those with faces, stored from his sighted years, and those without, whom he had met since losing his sight. This period was characterized by what Hull called cognitive dissonance, the painful tension between knowing intellectually that his life had changed while emotionally clinging to his sighted identity. He was not yet ready to accept blindness, only to endure it.
Beyond Light and Darkness: Spiritual Transformation
As Hull's journey deepened, his theological training began to provide a framework for understanding his experience beyond mere loss or disability. Drawing particularly from Psalm 139, with its assertion that "darkness and light are both alike to thee," Hull began to explore blindness not as the absence of sight, but as an alternative state of being. This represented a crucial shift from seeing himself as a sighted person who could no longer see to recognizing himself as someone entering an entirely different mode of existence. The psalm's themes of divine omniscience and presence became personally meaningful as Hull realized that God's knowledge transcends the visual, encompassing both the seen and unseen worlds. This spiritual reframing allowed Hull to move beyond what he termed the "archetype of blindness" that associates darkness with ignorance, confusion, and unconsciousness. Instead of fighting against the darkness or seeking to escape it, he began to explore what lay beyond the traditional opposition between light and darkness. This theological perspective offered him what he called an "alternative archetype" that could unify and transcend the painful duality of sighted versus blind experience. He discovered that in God's perspective, darkness and light held equal value, suggesting that his journey into blindness might be a journey toward, rather than away from, understanding. The recordings from this period reveal Hull's growing comfort with what he termed "acoustic space" and his developing appreciation for the rich world of sound and touch. He began to recognize that the blind person's reality was not impoverished but different, operating according to its own laws and offering its own rewards. Rain became a source of joy, revealing the contours of his environment in ways that sight never had. The wind carried information and beauty that he had never previously noticed. This shift in perception represented more than adaptation; it was a fundamental transformation in his understanding of what it means to be human and aware in the world.
Accepting the Gift: Finding Meaning in Loss
The final stage of Hull's journey involved perhaps the most radical reframing of all: coming to understand blindness not merely as something to be endured or even accepted, but as a gift to be received. This transformation reached its culmination during a visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal, where Hull found himself saying, "I accept the gift," while surrounded by the cathedral's magnificent organ music. This moment represented not resignation but a positive embrace of blindness as having its own value and meaning, separate from any comparison to sighted experience. Hull's concept of blindness as a gift was complex and paradoxical. He was careful to note that it was not a gift he would wish on anyone, nor one for which he felt gratitude in any conventional sense. Rather, it was what he called a "terrible gift," one that, once received, opened up new possibilities for understanding and being. He began to see himself not as a disabled person but as what he termed a "whole-body-seer," someone in whom the function of sight had been distributed throughout the entire body rather than concentrated in the eyes. This represented a fundamental shift from a deficit model of blindness to one that recognized it as simply a different order of human being. The recordings from this final period reveal Hull's growing intellectual vitality and creative energy. He described feeling clearer and more excited about ideas than ever before in his life, suggesting that the enforced inward turn of blindness had allowed him to discover internal resources previously untapped. His relationships with his children evolved as he learned new ways of playing and connecting that didn't depend on sight. Most significantly, he developed what he called a "trans-world" perspective, recognizing that while blindness created a smaller, more concentrated world, it was still a complete world in itself, held within the larger world of the sighted but possessing its own integrity and value.
Summary
John Hull's journey into blindness ultimately reveals a profound truth about human adaptability and the multiple ways of experiencing reality. His transformation from a man desperately clinging to his sighted identity to someone who could embrace blindness as a different but complete way of being demonstrates the remarkable capacity of human consciousness to reconstruct itself even in the face of devastating loss. Hull's insight that blindness is not the absence of sight but the presence of a different kind of awareness challenges our assumptions about disability and ability, suggesting that what we consider deficits may actually be alternative forms of human experience with their own gifts and possibilities. For anyone facing significant life changes or losses, Hull's story offers two crucial lessons: first, that the journey from devastation to acceptance cannot be rushed and may take years to unfold; and second, that true healing comes not from returning to what was lost but from discovering what new possibilities emerge from our changed circumstances. His work speaks particularly to those in caregiving professions, family members of disabled individuals, and anyone seeking to understand how meaning can be found even in the most challenging circumstances.
Related Books
Download PDF & EPUB
To save this Black List summary for later, download the free PDF and EPUB. You can print it out, or read offline at your convenience.
By John M. Hull
