@HomewithDean – Homily 06/11

We’ve been talking home theater this weekend — the realm of sight and sound — and it was a nice launching point for some things I’ve been pondering. So, I’ll leave you with this thought to day …You and I live in a largely visual world. A bright world of millions of colors, sharp focus and crisp clean edges. That’s because as eyes go, humans have a pretty impressive setup. We’re not going to win any best-in-class awards but in the all around vision category we’re at the top of the heap. Nevertheless, there remains a lot that we don’t see. We don’t detect motion as well as some animals. We don’t see as far into the infrared or ultraviolet spectrum or have as good of night vision as others.The same is true for our hearing. It’s rates as “pretty good” in the animal kingdom. Not awful by any means, but also not too exceptional. We have two ears conveniently mounted on opposite sides of our head which is good because it allows us to process sound directionally, aka: stereo. Our brains are designed to detect the speed of the delay from a sound hitting one ear first and then the other. That’s how we can tell where a sound is coming from. But even that has its limits. Put us underwater and our directional hearing is useless. Sound travels much faster in water than through the air. Too fast for our software to detect the delay. One of the first lessons that every beginning scuba diver must learn is that even though you will hear plenty of sounds in the water, you won’t be able to tell where they’re coming from. So don’t lose sight of your dive partner because, even though you may hear them, you won’t be able to follow that sound to them. For humans, hearing underwater has noticeable limits.But that’s true for all our senses all the time. We see, hear, taste, touch and feel, in ways that seem like we’re fully perceiving the whole world around us, but reality is, at every turn, far greater than what the limits of our senses will allow us to experience. My cat, my dogs, the squirrels, birds and bees just outside the window, t