Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker recounts a moment in her life when she was 8 years old and one of her brothers shot her in the eye with a BB gun. This “accident” left her blind in one eye and with a mass of white scar tissue, a disfiguring cataract, on that eye. It became an embarrassment and a torment to her.

Years later, when she was 27 years old and her daughter Rebecca was 3 years old, Walker had an experience that shifted the parameters of her world. As Walker describes it:

Since (Rebecca’s) birth I have worried about her discovery that her mother’s eyes are different from other people’s. … Every day Rebecca watches a television program called “Big Blue Marble.” It begins with a picture of the earth as it appears from the moon. It is bluish, a little battered-looking, but full of light, with whitish clouds swirling around it. Every time I see it I weep with love, as if it is a picture of Grandma’s house. ¹

One day when Walker is settling Rebecca in for an afternoon nap, Rebecca suddenly focuses on her eye. Walker says that in that moment,

“something inside me cringes, gets ready to try to protect myself. All children are cruel about physical differences, I know from experience, and that they don’t always mean to be is another matter”.²

Walker assumes her daughter will be the same.

But no-o-o. She studies my face intently as we stand, her inside and me outside her crib. She even holds my face maternally between her dimpled little hands. Then, looking every bit as serious and lawyer-like as her father, she says, as if it may just possibly have slipped my attention: “Mommy, there’s a world in your eye.” (As in, “Don’t be alarmed, or do anything crazy.”) And then, gently, but with great interest: “Mommy, where did you get that world in your eye?”³

Walker says that for the most part, her pain left then. Looking into the mirror, she recognized that there was a world in her eye. And she realized that it was possible to love her face:

“that in fact, for all it had taught me of shame and anger and inner vision, I did love it. ”⁴

Easter is a time to recognize the ways we have faced – and are yet called to face – our wounds and our flaws. To surrender to the transformation God is working in us and accept ourselves as God does – as persons who are beautiful, imperfectly whole, and free. Resurrected even while we struggle.

As Sr. Joan Chittister says:

“Every time Jesus rises in our own hearts in new ways, the Resurrection happens again. Every time we see Jesus where we did not recognize him before—in the faces of the poor, in the love of the unloved, in the revelatory moments of life, Jesus rises anew.⁵

He is risen as he said. So are we. There’s a world in our eye.