These days, I wear clip-on sunglasses when I drive into the city. I've become photosensitive; very bright daylight makes me feel sick and shaky, so I do need protection from the sun. The shades help; so does a large straw hat.

Was driving in to the office yesterday, all protectively be-shaded, when I realized to my discomfiture that something was mildly wrong. Things looked .. not quite right. It took me a while, but I finally figured out what the problem was.

Now, this has been an incredible year for flowers, domestic and wild: I have never seen such hollyhocks, such pansies and petunias, such a uproar of coreopsis, of daisies and black-eyed Susans and you-have-it. Even my poor garden has a few flowers, which should tell you. Purple loosestrife, noxious but gorgeous, is running riot right now, along with masses of Queen Anne's lace and something yellow I don t know the name of.

And it all looked wrong with sunglasses on.

It's not like the gentle dulling of cloudy light or rain; that sort of quiet, true light merely intensifies the natural colours. The colours become more themselves in softer light. No, this was different: filtering the light shifted the colours into shades that were slightly off and far less interesting. Take the purple loosestrife (please!) It normally flowers in quite a cheerful shade of fuschia--its one redeeming characteristic, since otherwise it's a real predatory summovabitch of a plant. Seen with sunglasses on, it went through a tint shift that made it dull, flattened, almost boring, without becoming one whit less obnoxiously aggressive. I didn't like that.

In fact, once I started thinking about it, I made a discovery: I may need the sunglasses, but I don't like them, and not just because they make Mother Nature look like she needs a good laxative. They didn't improve the cityscape either.

I don't like the way sunglasses make the face that's wearing them inaccessible. If a person's soul looks out of the person's eyes, then what do sunglasses do? If I'm wearing them and you aren't, then my face is guarded, invulnerable, private--and in fact, that's why some people wear shades--while yours is still naked to my hidden eye. Your only real defence is to guard your own face, either with shades of your own or with that woodenly expressionless blankness that poses for Being Cool, until a person realizes how silly it really is. And if you guard your face, I have to guard mine more closely, and so on and so forth, until you might as well wear something carved in elm on the front of your noggin. Not a positive way of operating, I think. Whatever closes us off from danger also closes us off from opportunity. Whatever shuts the door on human contact also shuts the door on love.

Sunglasses are about filtering--about accepting only the amount of light we feel we can comfortably handle, and only the wavelengths we like. We find ways of hiding from what we don't like, whether it's strong sunlight, being looked at, our own shortcomings, or the pain of the world.

Filters may be necessary, but that doesn't make them a good thing. When I flip past the magazine photospread on the Sudan, without really looking at it--in fact, quite purposefully skipping the story--I am filtering. If I had to take that reality into myself properly--that hollow-cheeked baby fruitlessly suckling its mother's collapsed and shrivelled breast--it would hurt so horribly. So I filter it out. I have enough on my plate already, I think; I can't do anything about this suffering anyway. No use getting my knickers into a twist about it.

Very true. And from there it s a very short step to ignoring the begger on the street, or filtering out the victims of abuse ("why don't you just get over it instead of bothering the rest of us?") It becomes possible to see any sharp brightness or strong shadow as being obtrusive and painful, until we find ourselves wanting to live in a dim world, free of corners or discomfort.

But that's not what God expects of us, because that's no way to grow a soul. God takes on the pain of the Sudan, takes it into Godself and redeems it, and that means I should be able to look at that reality with compassion, but without flinching. Because that's how we grow our souls--not by filtering out the things we think we can't handle, but by learning slowly to handle them, a little at a time. Sometimes we may genuinely need filters. But we should always be aware that they have their price: less pain, maybe, but also less joy.

In this life, I'm probably always going to need some protection from full sunlight, but in the next, I will accommodate to brightness. In this world, I may need to see through these glasses, darkly, but in the next, I will learn to accept and welcome and increasingly rejoice in the Light. Unfiltered.