Do we see or feel God?  Maybe we do both.  Majid Majidi's film Color of God, usually titled in English The Color of Paradise, explores this question.  The Color of Paradise tells the story of a blind boy who wants to see God.  Although he senses he feels God when he roams the hillsides near his home, he really wants most to see him.
     Meanwhile, as the boy's (Mohammad) father, a widower, prepares to remarry, he is reluctant for his bride-to-be's family to know about Mohammad.  He fears they will see Mohammad's blindness as a bad omen.  So he sends Mohammad away to live with, ironically, a blind carpenter.  When Mohammad tells the carpenter that he wants not just to feel God, but to see him as well, the carpenter reminds him that God is everywhere: wouldn't you, he asks Mohammad, therefore know him as well as anyone who sees him?
     As the story continues, Mohammad's father's fiance's family learns of the boy's blindness and calls off the wedding.  Crestfallen yet now realizing that he can bring Mohammad back, his father fetches him and begins the journey home.  Along the way, however, a bridge on which they are walking collapses and Mohammed falls into the water.  As the current carries him away, his father hesitates, then goes after him.  But soon he, too, is caught in the swift flowing water.
     In the closing scene, Mohammad's father finds himself on the shore of the Caspian Sea, shaken but alive.  Then he sees Mohammad's lifeless body, washed up nearby.  He weeps As a woodpecker then hammers away overhead, his father sees Mohammad's fingers move, seemingly tapping to the sound.  In a moment of magic, much like the magical realism of Gabriel Marquez's novels, Mohammad's father thinks:  maybe his son finally sees God. Maybe now, in the land beyond death, in the land of green fields and profuse gardens, Mohammad's wishes have come true.  Though once he could only feel God, perhaps now he can do far more.
     Aren't we all like Mohammad?  In this life, we will never see God.  One day, however, we will.  Yet I like to think that the greater the deprivations of sight we suffer in this life, the greater will be our wonder when we finally lose them.  Now, we see the earth, we feel God.  How much greater will it be when we can no longer see the earth, but see only God?