Blind Man Prefers Non-Braille Bible

Apr 20, 2018

It’s so silent…

“My preferred holy tome is a non-braille Bible,” said Mark Rodgers, a 54-year old blind man from Spokane.  “I love how smooth and silent its message is.  I read page after page and enter the truth of the great nothing.  John 3:16 y'all.”

Mark was born blind.  He grew up in a shabby Charles Dickens orphanage and spent his childhood years reading the orphanage's one braille book: A moldy King James braille edition bible.  Its configuration of dots dazzled him for weeks upon end.  He’d polish its dusty pages to a finger-pointed shine.

“But at some point don’t you get tired of all the dots?” asked Mark to his braille teacher.  But he was only met with his teacher's undecoded silence.  “So I smuggled in some clandestine braille literature.  I tried a braille Koran and a braille Bhagavad Gita, but they too started to feel like more dots, literally.  I even tried a braille Atlas Shrugged, since a lot of Americans worship that.  But still… something didn't feel right, tactilely, in my heart."

Mark began asking his sighted friends if they ever felt the way he did.

“Do the words you read start to look like random squiggles?  Are words more of a Rorschach test then anything written in stone?  Ever try reading a braille bible with your eyes?  Know what I mean?  Does you feel like that?”

That's when a serendipitous event occurred.  Some bully at his orphanage swapped out that one and only braille King James Bible with a English word King James bible.  The bully gave Mark letters to read, not dots.

“I picked it up, and for the first time… I’m not sure how to describe it.  I felt it.  Screw let there be light.  Let there be darkness.  Here finally I felt the power of silence.  A silence that got deeper with each turn of the page.  So I got baptized in these waters.  I converted to Christianity.  God bless you all.”

We wish Mark all the best in his newfound passion.

And you too.  For just a taste of what can be, we'd like to ask you, our dear reader of The Tilted Glass, to close your eyes and read this article on your screens with your fingers.