FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PUBLISHER
Paul D. Robbins
January 1, 1987
Currently, I'm reading a fascinating Book-of-the-Month Club offering entitled The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The author, a poetically gifted neurologist, discusses a series of case studies from the patients' point of view. The first study describes an exceptionally talented music professor who suffers from visual agnosia, a neurological disorder that inhibits one's ability to process whole images. For example, while the professor identified and remembered specific details about someone's face-an unusual nose, mustache, or beard-he drew a complete blank when shown a picture of his brother, mother, or wife. While in the neurologist's office, he confused his wife with an adjacent hall tree and tried to lift her head from her body, thinking it was his hat. As he scanned a large National Geographic photo, his eyes would dart from one detail to another, picking up tiny features but never processing the scene as a whole. The author, Oliver Sacks, says, "He never entered into relation with the pictures a whole . . . he had no sense of landscape or scene." Dr. Sacks's statement about never relating to "the picture as a whole" has stimulated a lot of thought about spiritual agnosia. I reexamined my perspective on the church and the ministry. Like you, I've been in a reflective mood while closing out the 1986 ministry year and pondering what might lie ahead. I'm painfully aware that my spiritual eyes, like the professor's physical eyes, oft dart from detail to detail, focusing on the specific, while failing to see what should be the obvious whole. During this self-examination I compared snatches of recent conversations with a devotional reading in Ezekiel. My responses to these conversations clearly indicated to me that I was focusing ...
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