Shattering the stained glass window
Have you ever stubbornly resisted someone else’s opinion only to discover that even though it was different from your own, you could see how it made sense? Thought you would hate summer camp and making friends with complete strangers but found life long friends? Judged someone without knowing them and ended up loving them? Experiencing any of these situations can be incredibly hard because we innately stand strong to our thoughts and opinions. Despite the difficulties, it is enormously liberating to have a long-held idea or cherished notion suddenly shattered for us, forcing us to think in new ways.
Everyone has different views when it comes to just about everything. In my eleventh grade government class we took a quiz where we read political situations that had an outcome that was either more republican or democratic. To respond, we had to say on a scale of 1 to 5 how much you agree or disagree with the outcome. As someone who sided with the Republican Party because that was my family’s affiliation, I thought for sure that when my points were added in the end, the result would be that I was a Republican. To my surprise, my results put me as a moderate democrat. To be honest, I was a little ashamed when I realized how easily I believed in something that I knew nothing about. From then on, I find it very difficult to simply accept a position rather than researching and making sure I actually support it.
Everyone also has different things that they judge immediately. In the short story “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, the main character expresses a general distaste for blind people. When his wife informs him that her blind friend, Robert, is coming to visit after just loosing his wife to cancer, he feels bothered by the fact that a blind man will be staying in his home and does not look forward to it. Having never met or personally known a blind person, his ideas of the blind are that they move slowly, never laugh, wear dark glasses, and are led by seeing-eye dogs. The narrator is stuck in everything in his life. He has a job that he doesn’t like, an inability to fix his marriage, and an addiction to substances to cope with his clearly depressive life. When Robert asks the narrator to draw the cathedral he was describing from the TV program, the narrator’s life changes. Robert tells him to draw with his eyes closed and as he details the gargoyles and stained glass windows in complete darkness, he learns how to let go and for the first time in possibly ever feels like he isn’t stuck inside anything. This blind man demolished what the narrator thought blind people would be like. By looking through Robert’s eyes, the narrator’s world opened up.
When I was 17 my aunt made my cousin and me go to Tools 4 Life camp in Bryn Athyn, PA. Having never been there and only hearing stories about the town revolving around the church and how our whole family is from there, of course my first assumption was that I was about to go to a church camp where everyone was religious and related to me. I dreaded going to a place where everyone knew everyone and I was the outsider trying to make friends with already established friends. To no surprise, I hated it, for the first three days. But when I realized that everyone was not weird or mean but just as nervous to make new friends as I was, I started to have the greatest time. If it wasn’t for being forced to go to this place that I never thought I really wanted to go to, I wouldn’t have met all of the friends that I did or ended up back in Bryn Athyn at Bryn Athyn College with my best friend from camp as my current roommate and best friend.
We all have long-held views, judgments, and opinions and it is surprising to realize how quickly they can be shattered. If we’re lucky, these shattered parts of ourselves turn into mosaics of new ideas and liberating thoughts that we’ve never experienced before and we can walk away saying “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.”(Carver 127)