Touching the Rock

Touching the Rock Plot Summary

Introduction

In the quiet moments between sleep and wakefulness, John Hull faced a profound paradox. As a sighted man for over forty years, he would often dream in vivid color, seeing his children's faces and exploring vibrant landscapes. Yet each morning, he would wake to total darkness, experiencing the loss of his sight anew. His journey into blindness was not merely a medical condition but a profound transformation of consciousness that challenged the very foundations of human experience. Hull's story transcends the typical narrative of disability and adaptation. As a theologian and educator, he approached his condition with an intellectual curiosity that transformed personal suffering into universal insight. Through his meticulous self-observations, we witness not only how a person learns to navigate a world without sight, but how blindness fundamentally alters one's relationship to space, time, memory, and even spirituality. The journey he documents invites us to reconsider our assumptions about perception, presence, and what it truly means to "see" the world around us—revealing that the most profound insights often emerge not despite darkness, but through it.

Chapter 1: The Descent: Losing Sight and Identity

John Hull began losing his sight gradually, starting with cataracts in childhood that required surgery, followed by detached retinas in his teens. Despite these early warning signs, the most dramatic deterioration occurred later in life. By the summer of 1983, at age 48, Hull had become completely blind, unable to distinguish even between day and night. This final transition occurred just as he was building a new life—he had remarried less than a year before his complete sight loss, and his son Thomas was born just three weeks after his final eye operation. The early months of total blindness created a crisis of identity that went far beyond practical challenges. Hull describes the eerie sensation of forgetting faces—even those of his wife Marilyn and his older daughter Imogen. More disturbingly, he began to lose his own self-image, unable to update his mental picture of himself as he aged. "I have become separated from my own shadow," he wrote, describing the strange dissociation between his remembered visual self and his present blind existence. This loss of visual memory became what Hull called "deep blindness"—not just the absence of sight but the fading of visual conceptualization itself. Hull's professional identity as a university professor and theologian was equally threatened. Having built his academic career on reading and writing, he suddenly faced a fundamental question: how could he continue his intellectual work? The simplest tasks became extraordinary challenges. In a poignant moment, he describes returning to his office after registering as blind to face walls covered with notes representing years of work, now completely inaccessible to him. Yet in this loss, a profound transformation began. Dreams became Hull's window into his psychological adjustment. In one recurring nightmare, he found himself on a sinking ship, being dragged inexorably into the "deep-green murky depths," representing his fear of being pulled ever deeper into blindness. Other dreams revealed his anxieties about incompetence, as when he dreamed of being unable to read music during an orchestra performance. These unconscious expressions revealed the emotional turmoil beneath his calm, methodical approach to adaptation. At its core, Hull's descent into blindness required him to reconsider the very meaning of presence. Without sight, the relationship between consciousness and environment fundamentally changed. "Other people have become both more abstract and more concrete," he observed, noting how people would materialize suddenly through touch or voice, without the gradual approach that sight provides. This altered state required him to reconstruct his understanding of reality itself, building a new foundation of being that wasn't dependent on visual experience.

Chapter 2: Navigating the Sensory Landscape: Sound, Touch, and Space

As Hull's visual world disappeared, other senses emerged with remarkable new prominence. Rain, once merely background atmosphere, became a profound revelation. "Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything," he wrote, describing how falling water created "continuity of acoustic experience" that revealed the landscape in its entirety. Through rain, Hull could perceive distance, dimension, and the relationship between objects—a rare moment when the world disclosed itself fully rather than appearing as fragmented islands of sound. The acoustic world offered a fundamentally different reality than the visual one. While sight presents a stable, continuous field where objects exist simultaneously, sound creates a world of action and movement that appears and disappears. "When there is rest, everything else passes out of existence," Hull observed. "To rest is not to be. To do is to be." This shifting soundscape meant Hull's world was constantly being created and dissolved, requiring a different form of attention than sight demands. Wind became particularly meaningful, offering a rare sensory experience that enveloped his entire body and connected him to distant spaces. Touch evolved from a utilitarian sense into a source of beauty and knowledge. Hull described the developing "art of gazing with my hands," finding pleasure in temperature, texture, and weight that had previously gone unnoticed. A stone owl, a wooden carving, a string of beads—these objects revealed themselves through fingers in ways that sight had never captured. Yet this tactile world remained limited to arm's length, creating a radical contraction of space. As Hull noted, "Only the area which can be touched with the body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live." Time underwent an equally profound transformation. Without visual cues marking the progression of day into night or summer into autumn, Hull experienced a curious time-inflation. Tasks that once took minutes now required hours, yet paradoxically, these hours seemed to hold less distinctive value. "Time, against which you previously fought, becomes simply the stream of consciousness within which you act," he observed. This altered relationship with time created a curious calm—colleagues remarked that Hull seemed to be the only person in the faculty who always had "all the time in the world." Navigation through space required new mental strategies that transformed Hull's cognitive mapping. Rather than visualizing routes, he projected the sensations his body would experience at various points along a path. "My place is known to me by the soles of my feet and by the tip of my cane," he wrote. This body-centered knowledge created a world of fragments—disconnected sensory islands that had to be laboriously linked together. Walking unfamiliar routes became exhausting not physically but cognitively, as each step required intense concentration to maintain orientation. While these sensory adaptations helped Hull function in the world, they also revealed the profound social challenges of blindness. The simple act of ordering food became problematic when he could not see the menu or the waiter. At parties, he found himself standing alone, unable to initiate conversations through the visual cues sighted people take for granted. In these moments, Hull confronted the power imbalance inherent in blindness—the way it rendered him simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, overlooked yet conspicuous in his difference.

Chapter 3: Family Relationships: Fatherhood in Darkness

Hull's relationship with his children became one of the most profound arenas for exploring the meaning of blindness. He had three distinct experiences of fatherhood: with Imogen, his daughter from a previous marriage who was seven when he lost his sight; with Thomas and Elizabeth, who were born during his transition to blindness; and with Gabriel, born after he had adjusted to total blindness. Each relationship revealed different dimensions of what it meant to be a father without sight. With his youngest children, Hull developed ingenious methods of interaction. He trained Thomas in the expression "Show Daddy," which meant "put whatever you've got in your hand into my hand and you will get it straight back." This simple technique allowed Hull to participate in his son's discoveries. Similarly, he taught Thomas to guide his father's finger to pictures in books. These adaptations created a foundation for connection, though Hull remained acutely aware of what was lost. During Thomas's fifth birthday party, he experienced the painful realization that he could not participate in the spontaneous admiration of presents, as his knowledge through touch required time that the excitement of the moment did not allow. The children's understanding of their father's blindness evolved in touching and sometimes humorous ways. Three-year-old Thomas asked if Hull could "only talk," prompting Hull to demonstrate that he could also listen, tickle, and shout. Four-year-old Elizabeth, struggling to articulate a profound insight, asked, "How can you smile between you and me, a smile, when you're blind?" She had intuitively grasped that blindness disrupted not just perception but the reciprocal nature of human expression. Most poignantly, when Hull explained that nothing would restore his sight, Elizabeth exclaimed that blindness was "like going down and down and down to the bottom of a very very very deep well where you can never get out." Hull's blindness also transformed his wife Marilyn's role. She became not just his partner but often his interpreter to the world, especially in social settings where Hull's ability to interact was limited. Their relationship had to accommodate not only the practical challenges of his disability but the emotional complexities it created. Hull described moments of cognitive dissonance when interacting with those he had once seen, caught between the fixed visual memory from the past and the present relationship conducted through sound and touch. Despite these challenges, Hull discovered unexpected joys in his children. With his youngest son Gabriel, born after Hull had fully adjusted to blindness, he found that touch, smell, and sound created a rich experience of fatherhood less encumbered by awareness of what was missing. "All of these things are very much less spoiled by the lack of sight than was the case with either Thomas or Lizzie," he wrote. This evolution marked Hull's growing acceptance of a different—but not necessarily diminished—form of fatherly connection. Perhaps most moving was how the children themselves adapted to guide their father. Thomas and Elizabeth learned to take Hull's hand and lead him, developing their own techniques for warning him of obstacles. As they walked to school, Hull and Thomas created a farewell ritual of calling "bye" back and forth until Thomas's voice faded into the distance—creating through sound the gradual separation that sight would normally provide. These moments revealed how the whole family participated in creating new forms of connection that transcended visual experience.

Chapter 4: The Cognitive Revolution: Thinking Without Seeing

Hull's transition to blindness required nothing less than a complete reconstruction of his cognitive framework. As a theologian and academic, his thinking had been deeply rooted in visual metaphors and visual information processing. The loss of sight forced him to develop entirely new systems for learning, memorizing, and conceptualizing the world. This cognitive revolution revealed both the limitations and unexpected strengths of non-visual thinking. Language itself presented immediate challenges. Hull noted the ubiquity of visual metaphors in everyday speech: "What is your point of view?" "I'll see if I can help you." "I just don't understand the way you look at this." These expressions revealed how deeply sight is embedded in our concepts of knowledge and understanding. Hull had to navigate the awkward moments when sighted friends would comment on his use of such phrases: "You don't really mean that, do you John?" His response—that these phrases expressed concepts beyond literal sight—highlighted how language itself had to be renegotiated. Memory underwent a profound transformation. Without visual cues, Hull had to develop new mnemonic systems. He discovered that names became crucial anchors for organizing information. While sighted people might recognize someone without recalling their name, Hull found names essential for maintaining social connections. Similarly, his relationship to books changed dramatically. Having been a voracious reader, he now had to learn to absorb information through listening, developing the skill to mentally outline and cross-reference material presented linearly in time rather than spatially on a page. Hull's professional life as a university lecturer required particular adaptation. Unable to use notes, he gradually developed what he called "scanning ahead" in his mind—the ability to project paragraphs of material from memory while speaking. This technique gave his lectures a new organizational clarity, as he mentally sorted his material into sections and subsections that could be retrieved in sequence. Colleagues noted with surprise his ability to cross-reference material from earlier in a lecture, a skill developed through necessity rather than design. Even abstract thinking changed character. Hull discovered that he was losing his grasp of certain visual concepts. In one striking moment, he could not remember which way the number three pointed and had to trace it in the air with his finger. Spelling became more challenging without the visual memory of words on a page. Yet alongside these losses came new cognitive strengths—an increased ability to concentrate, to analyze complex ideas, and to make connections between concepts. Hull found himself "connecting more, remembering more, making more links in my mind between the various things I have read and had to learn over the years." This cognitive transformation culminated in what Hull called becoming a "whole-body-seer"—someone for whom perception is no longer specialized in the eyes but distributed throughout the entire body. This represented not just adaptation but evolution into a fundamentally different way of knowing the world. "Being a WBS," he wrote, "is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions. It is a state, like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female, it is one of the orders of human being."

Chapter 5: Social Dynamics: Navigating a Sighted World

The social dimensions of blindness created some of Hull's most painful challenges. Simple human interactions became complicated negotiations, revealing how deeply social connection is mediated through sight. In crowded settings like parties, Hull found himself paradoxically isolated. "I find noisy parties, especially discos, so lonely," he wrote, explaining how background noise would obliterate voices, leaving him unable to locate conversation partners or interpret social cues that would normally guide interaction. Hull developed creative strategies to overcome these limitations. In social gatherings, he invented what he called his "litmus paper test"—asking companions to scan the room and take him to someone they recognized. This allowed him to circulate and meet people, but it also revealed much about his companions. Some would announce loudly, "John Hull would like to have a word with you!" creating awkward expectations, while others smoothly integrated him into conversations without drawing attention to his disability. These responses became a kind of social examination, revealing the empathy and social intelligence of those around him. The reciprocal nature of sight created particularly complex social dynamics. Hull observed that sighted people assume reciprocity in perception—"I see you; therefore you see me." This assumption breaks down with blindness, creating situations where Hull felt he had become invisible to others because he could not see them. At a university interview, his colleague later told him that the candidate never once looked at Hull, addressing all responses to his sighted colleague despite Hull asking the questions. "Being invisible to others," Hull concluded, "I become invisible to myself." Public reactions to blindness ranged from compassionate to bizarre. Hull describes a hospital stay where his journey down a ward became a gauntlet of well-meaning but confusing advice shouted from every bed. "Left a little! Right a little! Watch out, mate!" In another incident, a stranger accosted him on campus, shouting "You bastard, you're not blind!" Such encounters revealed how blindness could become a projective screen for others' anxieties and assumptions. More subtle were the infantilizing tendencies Hull encountered, as when people would speak about him in the third person: "Will you put John in the back with you?" Even religious responses could be problematic. Hull recounts visits from faith healers convinced that his blindness resulted from sin or spiritual failings. One instructed him to carry a Bible in his pocket at all times to regain his sight; another performed a ritual involving water and prayer. These encounters revealed how disability often becomes moralized, with physical conditions interpreted as spiritual judgments requiring specific remedies. Hull resisted these interpretations, developing instead a theology that embraced rather than rejected his condition. Perhaps most poignant were Hull's reflections on the changed quality of presence. Without sight, the experience of being with others was fundamentally altered. Voices seemed to come from nowhere and disappear into nowhere. Body contact became startling because it occurred without visual preparation. Even the distinction between telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings became blurred, as both consisted primarily of disembodied voices. These experiences led Hull to question the very nature of human presence: "What is it to be with someone? What is it to be somewhere?"

Chapter 6: Spiritual Awakening: Finding Meaning in Blindness

Hull's background as a theologian provided him unique resources for confronting the spiritual dimensions of his blindness. Rather than accepting traditional religious interpretations of disability as divine punishment or test, he undertook a radical theological exploration of what blindness might reveal about human experience and divine reality. This journey led him to profound insights that transformed his understanding of both faith and perception. The Psalms became especially meaningful, particularly Psalm 139 with its declaration that "darkness and light are both alike to thee." Hull found in this text a vision of God that transcended the light/darkness binary that structured human experience. "Because I am never in the light," he reflected, "it is equally true that I am never in the darkness. I have no fear of the darkness because I know nothing else." This perspective offered a kind of liberation—if God transcends both light and darkness, then blindness could be understood not as separation from divine reality but as a different mode of participation in it. Hull's experience of rainfall became a spiritual epiphany, revealing how non-visual perception could offer its own form of revelation. When rain fell, the acoustic continuity allowed him to perceive the entire environment simultaneously, creating a sense of wholeness typically unavailable to him. "I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me," he wrote. This experience became a metaphor for divine disclosure—the way God might reveal reality through unexpected channels when conventional paths are closed. Dreams took on particular spiritual significance, offering both comfort and challenge. In one powerful dream, Hull found himself in a religious retreat center built over magnificent waterfalls. The cascading water represented powerful movement and energy under control—a counterpoint to his earlier nightmare of being dragged down by water into depths. These dream images provided psychological processing but also spiritual insights about the movement from fear to acceptance, from being overwhelmed to finding meaning. A pivotal moment in Hull's spiritual journey came during a Mass at Notre Dame Cathedral in Montreal. Surrounded by powerful organ music, Hull found himself repeatedly saying, "I accept the gift. I accept the gift." This marked a profound shift from resistance to acceptance, from viewing blindness as loss to recognizing it as "a dark, paradoxical gift." This acceptance wasn't resignation but transformation—recognizing that blindness offered a different mode of being that contained its own possibilities for insight and connection. Hull's spirituality increasingly focused on presence rather than visual revelation. While traditional religious imagery often emphasizes seeing God, Hull developed a theology of divine encounter through sound, touch, and presence. "God is heard but not seen," he wrote, noting that religions speak of not seeing God but seldom of not hearing him. This shift from visual to auditory metaphors for divine encounter allowed Hull to develop a spirituality that integrated rather than denied his blindness. Perhaps most significantly, Hull came to understand his blindness as participation in a larger pattern of human limitation and possibility. Rather than viewing blindness as separating him from others, he recognized it as one of many "concentrated human conditions" that define different modes of human existence. "If a journey into light is a journey into God," he concluded, "then a journey into darkness is a journey into God." This theological reframing allowed Hull to find meaning not despite blindness but through it.

Chapter 7: Blindness as Gift: Transformation and Acceptance

The culmination of Hull's journey came with his gradual recognition of blindness as a form of gift—albeit a "terrible gift" he would never have chosen. This paradoxical framing represented not resignation but transformation, allowing Hull to integrate his condition into a meaningful life narrative. "One must recreate one's life or be destroyed," he observed, and in the recreation came the possibility of seeing blindness not merely as loss but as catalyst for a different kind of wholeness. After approximately five years, Hull began to experience what he called "the end of mourning." The acute grief and panic that had characterized his early blindness gradually gave way to a calmer acceptance. Walking home one evening, Hull suddenly realized the contrast between how others perceived him—as a vulnerable blind man at a dangerous crossing—and his own internal experience of competence and spatial awareness. "They think I'm blind, but I'm not!" he thought, before correcting himself: "They think I'm ignorant and helpless... But I am probably as safe as the average sighted pedestrian at this crossing." This acceptance didn't erase the difficulties of blindness but transformed Hull's relationship to them. He noted a curious intellectual awakening that accompanied his adjustment: "I now feel clearer, more excited and more adventurous intellectually than ever before in my life. I find myself connecting more, remembering more, making more links in my mind between the various things I have read and had to learn over the years." Without the constant stimulation of visual input, his mind turned inward, developing new capacities for analysis and integration. Hull's concept of blindness as gift found powerful expression in his experience of listening to the Wild Geese choir singing African liberation songs. While others thought he was missing the visual spectacle of their colorful clothing and radiant faces, Hull found himself completely absorbed in the acoustic experience. "I do not believe that my feeling of blessedness lacked anything because the visual element was absent," he wrote. This represented a profound realization—that blindness was not merely the absence of sight but a different mode of presence that contained its own completeness. The bell-ringing at a wedding provided another moment of transcendent awareness. While others lamented that Hull couldn't see the beautiful church, he found himself completely absorbed in the sound of the bells. "The air was full of the vibrations. My head seemed to be ringing. The ground seemed to be trembling, and the very air was heavy and springy with the reverberations." This immersive experience revealed how blindness had not diminished his capacity for aesthetic appreciation but redirected it through different channels. Hull ultimately came to see blindness not as a condition to be overcome but as a distinctive state of being. "Being a WBS [whole-body-seer] is to be in one of the concentrated human conditions," he wrote. "It is a state, like the state of being young, or of being old, of being male or female, it is one of the orders of human being." This framing moved beyond both stoic acceptance and bitter resistance, recognizing blindness as a valid and complete way of experiencing the world—different from sight, but not inherently diminished. In his final reflection, Hull articulated the paradox at the heart of his journey: "Blindness is a paradoxical world because it is both independent and dependent." It is independent as "an authentic and autonomous world, a place of its own," yet dependent because "somewhere along the line, at the end of the road, there is someone with eyes." This tension between autonomy and dependency, between the integrity of blind experience and its relationship to the sighted world, remained unresolved—not as failure but as the creative space in which Hull continued to navigate his transformed life.

Summary

John Hull's journey through blindness reveals that our deepest transformations often come not through choosing our path but through finding meaning within the path that chooses us. His evolution from resistance to acceptance—and ultimately to recognition of blindness as a "dark, paradoxical gift"—offers profound insight into how human consciousness can adapt to radical change. Hull shows us that limitation, when fully embraced, can become not merely a constraint but a doorway to different modes of perception and understanding that might otherwise remain inaccessible. The true legacy of Hull's experience lies in its challenge to conventional understandings of disability as mere lack or loss. By documenting his transformation into what he called a "whole-body-seer," Hull invites us to reconsider the hierarchy of perceptual modes that privileges sight above all other senses. For those navigating significant life changes or limitations, his journey suggests that adaptation requires not just practical adjustments but a fundamental reimagining of identity itself. His testimony speaks powerfully to anyone seeking to find meaning within circumstances they would never have chosen but must nonetheless inhabit with as much presence and integrity as possible.

About Author

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John M. Hull

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