How One Small Ear Smashed Spiritual Deafness

 “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both” (Prov 20:12).

Even though in nature there is an illusion of randomness we still find a divine plan under the surface. This is what happened to Whitaker Chambers. At the outset of the Cold War, he was one of many Soviet spies operating in the United States. He was an American atheist, writer, editor and a member of the Communist party. Now he is famous for his faith, patriotism and courage.

Unknown to the Soviet agents that he worked with, one day he had an unexpected intrusion of grace which had to do with an ear. This led to his conversion first spiritually and then politically. In his autobiography, Witness, he wrote about the ordinary moment when God broke through his spiritual deafness.

“My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the floor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: 'No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design.' The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my head” -W. Chambers, Witness

After this breakthrough, Chambers went on to reject his atheistic Communism, “What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step”.

He then became a double-agent, working for the Americans. He became famous for exposing the other Communist spies including a government official named Alger Hiss who were in his underground spy network.

He found God, the logic of the Logos, in the plan, in the details and design of one small ear. 

This is an example of natural revelation. “The Church teaches that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty from his works, by the natural light of human reason.” (CCC 47)  For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:19-20). 

They say that the longest trek that many will make in his process of conversion is from the head to the heart. I think, for Chambers it happened all at once because the ear belonged to his daughter so his heart was already invested in the epiphany experience. This article linked here from Truth in Science, says much more about the impossibility that the human ear developed by chance,  What the Ear Reveals About the Creator.