Behold

“Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.” – Psalm 119:18

The first year of ophthalmology residency is probably the most difficult year of training. Here you are, a full-fledged M.D. who has finally gotten the hang of general medicine and life on the wards, and you are plunged into a world you know nothing about. No physician outside of the field knows anything about the eye, so no one has really prepared you for it. The courses you took in medical school are largely useless. And my program followed a “sink or swim” strategy in which we were thrown into the deep end and expected to figure it out. 

One of the most nerve-wracking things we had to do as first-years was present every week at Grand Rounds, where all the faculty would gather to scrutinize us as we reviewed interesting cases we had handled. Most of us kept a list in our white coat pockets of anything remotely interesting we found in desperate hopes that we would have something to present. One of my co-residents always seemed to have a longer list than mine. I finally realized during our morning rounds that we could do the same eye exam, but he would catch all kinds of rare findings that I missed, simply because he read more. “You see what you look for, and you look for what you know,” he shrugged. 

It’s like what Sherlock Holmes says: “You see, but you do not observe.” The issue was not whether the interesting exam findings were there, but whether or not I had the ability to see them. The word for “open” here is galah, “to uncover, to reveal”: the picture is of something that is always there; it’s only a matter of whether or not we can see it. 

And there’s a tone of wonder and intimacy here. Galah is often used when speaking of uncovering nakedness, of showing something that is typically veiled or clothed, and the word for “wondrous” is repeated twice, for emphasis. It’s a word that means “marvelous, surpassing, extraordinary, beyond one’s own ability.”

I remember feeling like that the first time I saw the optic nerve in stereoscopic view. Here was someone who was letting me look through their cornea, past their dilated iris, into their very brain. I was seeing their neural tissue, in all its three-dimensional topography and pulsating color, as no one else could. It was beyond anything anyone could have engineered. It was wondrous.

God’s law is shot through with wonder. With marvelous things quite beyond ourselves. And the more we see, the more we know and suspect that there is more to see, if only we have the eyes to do so. The psalmist’s words may as well be the prayer of our Bible-reading journey: open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law.