WE HAVE the spirituality that is in the interests of the people with whom we stand in solidarity. The wealthy and powerful are embedded within a spirituality that, consciously or not, contributes to maintaining their interests in the world.

This is because our spirituality, made up as it is of our self-ideals, our hopes and dreams, our interpretation of our place in the world and our relationship with others, together with our perception of the transcendent meaning of our lives, necessarily reflects our position in society.

Gradually, I adopted the spirituality appropriate to a theological lecturer, a mixture of critical commitment, inquiry, and an interest in the personal growth of my students. I had a spirituality of meaning, in the sense that my main understanding of Christian faith was that it offered meaning to our lives.

Then I went blind. I realised that my consciousness as a sighted person had not been absolute, but was limited, and had given me a certain point of view.

During those years, I had become interested in false consciousness and self-deception as elements in spirituality. I was increasingly successful in my career. At the same time, however, I realised that false consciousness was creeping up my life like a rising tide. It became easier to see life from the top of the pile, and more difficult to imagine it from underneath.

It was blindness that saved me from completely succumbing to this fatal falseness. Facing every day a dozen frustrations and little humiliations, continually aware of my dependence upon others, alienated at the same time from an easy rapport with other people, I became increasingly conscious of the way that marginalised and disabled people experience the world.

Then it dawned upon me that the greatest spiritual force in the world today is money. Nothing affects our imagining of the good life and the way we mould our ambitions so as to attain it as does money.

Gradually, I felt my way towards a spirituality of justice. I came to see that the search for justice and the struggle against the forces of money, which prevent universal justice, is the way that God is known. This is the transcendent element in our living, the particularities of concrete justice in solidarity with others.

Implementing this in my life presents me with a continual series of new falsehoods and further layers of self-deception. Beneath this, however, I believe that I am somehow sustained by a love and a grace that is both smaller than me and greater than me. It is smaller than me because it pays attention to every detail.

The life of a blind person is crowded with details so small that sighted people seldom notice them. It is greater than me because it is the environment in which I live. The life of a sighted person is set within realities, like stars, hills, and cities, which are almost too large to be realised.

When I discovered the marble altar in Iona Abbey, in the middle of the night, I found that there were jagged scratches, on either side of which the expanse of polished stone stretched smooth as silk, further than I could reach.

This surface was made by people, but in the excoriations there was something older and deeper, a rock not cut by hands. Which was the small and which the great? The scratches were small, and the surface was great; yet the altar was small, and the rock was great.

This is the second of four edited extracts from The Tactile Heart: Blindness and faith by John M. Hull (SCM Press, £25 (CT Bookshop £22.50); 978-0-334-04933-3).