Peripheral Visions

I seem to have understood that for the individual color is an artifact of perception, but it didn’t occur to me as a child that color is encountered through the understandings of a community. Whatever the physics of wavelengths of light and the biochemistry and neurology of color vision as determined for most of us by genetics, the experience of blue remains totally private, and the shared meaning of blue has to be socially constructed—not, of course, from nothing but as a building is constructed from the facts of gravity and balance, the characteristics of materials, the purposes and meanings of human beings.
    The fable expresses a reversal of the most visible patterns of education. Here, a child teaches adults. That reversal occurs more often than we realize, for much of what adults learn is learned from children. Newborns come equipped to turn their elders into parents, and on-the-job training continues from then on. After immigration or when the environment is changing rapidly, parents must use their children as guides to the new reality that surrounds them, like the wise children in fairy tales, or as models, as the Gospels demand. Learning is ideally a two-way street. Children participating in adult occasions see things adults have learned not to see and guess at meanings missing in official explanations.
    Several years ago I was invited to a weekend conference at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York to explore emerging understandings of human perception and to wrestle with the new biology in relation to Buddhist and Judeo-Christian understandings of the interface of cognition and reality. I had been asked, as a layperson, to preach on Sunday to the normal Sunday congregation with conference participants mixed in, so I would have to speak at two levels. At one level, I would be responding to what had been said at the conference about the nature of color vision. At another level, I would be speaking to a great mixture of people who knew nothing of our ongoing conversation—men and women from the neighborhood, bridging Columbia University and Morningside Drive on the one hand and the beginnings of Harlem on the other; children in the choir; tourists staying at downtown hotels; connoisseurs who sought out the cathedral for its architecture and its music, or who had discovered St. John’s as one of those few places that maintain the medieval image of a cathedral as a center of intellectual and artistic excitement.
    For most of the congregation, my remarks would have to stand without the context of the conference, required by courtesy to fit into the service and the genre of a sermon, but I was determined to address my colleagues as well. It was a daunting assignment, but after all many human encounters are experienced in different ways by different participants, like the very best of children’s classics, read aloud by parents enjoying a different layer of humor. The Anglican communion has always included a miscellany of saints, sharing the words of a common liturgy but bringing with them a diversity of beliefs. There have been periods, there still are parishes, where uniformity of belief or social class is sought after, but in most places diversity of experience is welcome and printed programs simplify participation for visitors and wandering anthropologists.
    Speaking from the pulpit of a vast Gothic cathedral is very different from speaking in a lecture hall or a classroom. You enter robed and in procession. Bearers walk ahead with a cross and huge torch candles. Organ music and incense fill the space. All the details of the service, even the products of the most modern wave of reforms, have been smoothed to ceremonial solemnity. The preacher at St. John’s climbs up a dark little stair at the back of the pulpit and emerges alone at the top to see not an audience but the epiphany of blue, a huge blue “rose” window at the back end of the church, a celestial firmament. Every time I have entered that pulpit, my mouth has gone dry, and I have clutched my notes and wondered what I could possibly be doing there. When I recollect myself and begin to speak, the echo of every word rolls back over the next one, as if each sentence had to merit layers and layers of repetition and long pauses in between. Oddly, I have little temptation in that setting to be didactic, little sense of authority. Instead I find myself speaking with a greater degree of intimacy than anywhere else.
    As I approached the