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» In Light of Faith
 
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A, March 2, 2008
by Genevieve M. McQuade
Blind! If you are a sighted person, what do you picture when you hear that word?
A person groping about in a field of obstacles?
Utter blackness?
Or lack of clarity, partial sight?
Blindness is the physical inability to see fully with one or both eyes due to various causes. Some forms include legal blindness, limited visual field blindness, low vision, and total blindness.
We enter a world of sighted blindness when we lack attentiveness, and more or less look through things as though not there.
Or what about an opposite sort of blindness when we are so focused that all else seems to fade into oblivion?
Maybe worst of all is the blindness of a darkened mind, with reason or judgment plainly misguided, even suspended. An immovable void somehow blocks inner light, like a black hole in one’s being, where truth could have dwelled.
In the remarkable ninth chapter of John’s gospel, the Pharisees’ refusal to listen to a man born blind demonstrates their extreme shortsightedness when they dispute this newly-sighted man’s testimony about the restoration of his vision, in stages, by Jesus.
He was tautly wedged between the indisputable facts of his miracle and the unrelenting barrage of questions posed by the Pharisees.
They hammered away, shrewdly revising their line of interrogation in their unsuccessful attempt to trick the man into saying what they wanted to hear — that Jesus was no more than an evil fraud and the man a sinner and liar.
This man had never once seen the light of day, not a glimmer. He hadn’t even asked Jesus for a reversal of his congenital blindness, a condition validated by his own parents to the inquisitors.
Their grilling inadvertently leads him to worship Jesus as Lord. Not only did this same man born blind change physically, he changed spiritually.
What would it take to jar us to take a fresh look at what Jesus has brought about in our own lives that we may “see” what we hadn’t noticed before?
Must we await a miracle or a forced examination of our lives?
Must we interrogate God for further proofs?
Do we also resist declarations of those whom Jesus has touched because they seem too foreign to our upbringing?
Can we simply accept Jesus on his word that He is the Light of the world?
Can we obey Jesus as He sends us as well to wash in our own “pool of Siloam” (John 9:7), our personal pool of complete restoration to baptismal purity of heart?
Or, like the rigid Pharisees with their constricted lens, do we distrust that Light in our presence as scientifically, or perhaps religiously, implausible?
With pharisaic cunning, do we insist on disproving what is self-evident?
Although our honest doubt does not condemn us, darkened self-satisfaction can.
Are we as open as the man born blind was?
That man was a beggar with an open posture of need, willing to accept truth, but not so, the Pharisees.
Let us open our eyes and acknowledge our need before our Lord. Wonderful things will happen!
“Not as man sees does God see…the Lord looks into the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).
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Lost in the familiar
by Mary Hood Hart
It was Superbowl Sunday afternoon and that evening we were expecting guests over to watch the game.
My daughter had volleyball practice at a high school in Wilmington, NC, about an hour away.
Anna doesn’t yet drive, so I left Jim at home to prepare for the guests and drove her to the practice. I’ve been to this high school (not hers) at least a half dozen times, for practices, games, even driving my kids there to take the SAT.
Somehow, upon leaving the school, driving Anna home from practice, I took a wrong turn. I don’t even now understand what I did wrong. After a minute, I recognized street names, made another turn, and thought I was heading home. I wasn’t.
It took a cell phone call to my husband to set me in the right direction. Anna and I arrived home more than a half hour later than we intended. Our guests had arrived, and the game was in the first quarter.
I am prone to getting lost, but this time even I was amazed. How could I get lost in such a familiar place? A place I’d driven to and from without any difficulty several times before?
Being lost in the wilderness is a Lenten theme, something most of us can certainly relate to. The wilderness is threatening because it is strange.
But what about being lost in the familiar? Is that something only people as “directionally challenged” as I am can relate to?
On further reflection, I sense that being lost in the familiar is common enough. Those in the early stages of Alzheimer’s must experience it. How frightening and disorienting it must be to discover that a once familiar route, routine, or face is suddenly lost to memory.
Another way we become lost in the familiar is when we are faced with a sudden, disorienting experience, illness, death, a betrayal, divorce. What we thought we knew, the way we were living and the relationships we depended upon, are suddenly cast in an unfamiliar light.
We feel lost because the comfortable routines we had relied upon are no longer available to us.
Perhaps the most dangerous way of being lost in the familiar is the experience of going through life’s daily routines without considering what we are doing.
We may get so caught up in pursuing our careers, our material wants, our pleasures and comforts that we realize only too late the toll this way of living has taken on our spiritual, physical, and emotional health.
Perhaps our dearest relationships suffer because we take them for granted. Perhaps we have become close-minded, unwilling to accept another’s point of view. We become lost in the familiar, not because we consciously stray, but because we remain focused on our own narrow path, a path that excludes God and others.
Once in a homily I heard a priest say, “We have to realize we are lost before we will ask for directions.”
Those words hit home with me. How easy it is to live each day in a state of denial, unwilling to examine our choices, our decisions, our routines because the prospect of changing our lives is too threatening.
Recognizing the human tendency toward complacency, toward selfishness, toward denial, toward the pursuit of power, we are challenged, especially during Lent, to consider the ways we become lost.
Lost like the Pharisees, have we become self-satisfied to the extent we’ve failed to love?
Lost like Judas, have we allowed our own agendas, our selfish motives, to prompt us to betray Jesus, not with a kiss, but by a way of living that brings suffering to others?
Lost like Peter, have we denied Christ, not so much in word, but in the ways we’ve avoided helping others because we seek to protect ourselves?
Lost like Pontius Pilate, do we allow injustice because we prefer not to get involved?
This Lent, may we have the courage to discover we are lost.
May that awareness lead us from the darkness of sin, through death to self, to life in Jesus Christ.
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Hands
by Barbara Hughes
In recent weeks, the image of hands has surfaced with surprising frequency in my spiritual journey.
Not long ago, I was in New York visiting my sister who has been battling late stage cancer for over a year. Although she is considerably younger than me, I was struck by the way her hands trembled.
Her physical weakness stood in sharp contrast to an inner strength that was rooted in her faith and trust in God.
Last week, as I sought a way to conclude a project I had been working on, I was drawn to a book about St. Therese of Lisieux entitled, “With Empty Hands.”
This saint of the “little way” understood how quickly she reached the limits of her capacity to give. In response, she opened her hands and asked God to fill her as he longs to fill each of us.
All we have to do is ask. Both images implied weakness, but like any paradox, they pointed to a deep truth: the importance of humility.
This truth is mirrored in an icon in our living room that was painted by a nun from Romania. The image is one of Jesus rising from a block-like tomb with the horizontal bar of the cross behind him.
But for me, the most striking part of the icon is the way the hands of Jesus are depicted. They are brought together in front of him as though they were bound, except there are no cords holding them together.
The artist explained that she painted them this way because Jesus went freely to his passion and death. He could have escaped but he chose not to.
The image of Jesus’ hands bound only by the cord of love is a striking portrayal of true humility.
It echoes the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Like a sheep led to the slaughter, he opened not his mouth.”
And again in Paul’s letter to the Philippians “Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself, obediently accepting death on a cross.”
The historical Jesus died and rose from the dead more than 2,000 years ago and yet, because we are his hands, the hands of the Son of God continue to be bound by the cord of love.
He has entrusted the building of his Kingdom to mortals who are both sinful and frail.
He invites us to chip away at a task that he could accomplish in an instant.
And all because God honors our freedom to choose, we have a gift that has been ours since the time of Adam and Eve. How could it be that Infinite Humility hands over to mortal beings so profound a task? And how, in light of this confidence, should we respond?
For the answer, we do well to turn once again to the humble saint of Carmel who wrote, “Love is paid only by love.”
Therese’s way of love did not imply a passive surrender to inactivity. She worked hard at building up the kingdom of God but in ways so obscure that her efforts escaped the gaze of her critics.
The more she realized her limitations, the more Therese trusted in God and that requires heroic courage.
It’s easy to trust God when we haven’t done our part, when we’ve slacked off or when that inevitable rainy day that prudence tells us we should have prepared for catches up with us.
Laziness can masquerade as trust when we expect God to make up for our lack of effort. That’s not trust; it’s being irresponsible.
Genuine trust requires remaining faithful when all our good work seems to go unrewarded or when that inevitable rainy day turns into a tornado that threatens to rip our life apart.
Genuine trust calls us to believe in the goodness of others long enough to listen to how God is speaking through them to build up his Kingdom.
And genuine trust recognizes that when the work of our hands is bound to God by the cord of love, the world is being re-created anew.
Although we may never reap the harvest from the seeds our hands plant, genuine trust believes they were not sown in vain.
When I look at my sister Mary give thanks for the days she feels well enough to help with simple household chores, I understand that there is something greater than human effort guiding her hands.
When I see her take pride in being able to unload the dishwasher despite the fact that her hands tremble, I’m reminded that it’s not what we do, but the love that motivates the work of our hands that’s important.
When our hands are bound by the cord of love, we are able to give and receive. We can reach out to those in need and we can accept all that comes our way.
For when our hands are bound to God by the cord of love, every moment is valued as a precious gift from God’s hands to ours.
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