Lent 4

Readings: 1 Sm 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a; Eph 5:8-14; Jn 9:1-41

VIDEO

In today’s Gospel we have two sorts of blindness.

There is the blindness that Jesus heals
and the kind that, at least in the story, remains unhealed.
The kind that Jesus heals is that of the man born blind—
physical blindness healed with spittle and mud,
an affliction that becomes the occasion 
for God’s power to be displayed in the work in Jesus.

We’re not told what sort of blindness afflicts this man,
and “blindness” can mean a lot of things.
There is the relatively rare condition of total blindness, 
which prevents one from perceiving 
any light whatsoever.
There is the more common condition
of partial blindness or low vision,
in which one can see some light and shapes,
but one’s activities are extremely restricted
by a lack of sight.
There are also cases of legal blindness:
extreme near- or far-sightedness
that diminishes the capacity to see to the point
where one’s daily activities might be impeded.
We also talk about color-blindness,
which is typically more an inconvenience
than it is a true affliction,
but does reduce one’s capacity
to take in visual information.

Then there is the other sort of blindness
depicted in the story,
the spiritual blindness that cannot be healed 
with mud and spittle.
This spiritual blindness is what keeps the Pharisees
from seeing that Jesus is one sent by God.
It is also what makes the disciples presume
that the affliction of the blind man 
must be a punishment for sin. 
We see it in our first reading as well,
in the inability to see in David the shepherd boy
God’s chosen leader of his people.

Just like physical blindness,
there are different kinds and degrees
of spiritual blindness.
There is total spiritual blindness,
in which one is totally cut off 
from any sense of transcendence,
any sense that there might be something more
than the brute material forces of the universe.
I suspect that, like total physical blindness,
this sort of spiritual blindness is comparatively rare,
found mainly in atheists on the internet
who are running as fast as they can
from the religious belief they were raised with.

More common is something analogous
to partial blindness or low vision:
those who sense that there is some larger reality
but cannot identify what it is,
who might call themselves agnostics,
because they are not sure 
what it is they are perceiving,
and so cannot commit to calling it God.

Then there are those who have the spiritual equivalent
of extreme near- or far-sightedness,
those who feel sure of the reality of God
but who cannot quite bring it into focus,
those whose spiritual lives are shapeless,
who might call themselves 
“spiritual but not religious.”

Finally, there are those whose spiritual vision
is perfect in terms of its clarity and definition,
but it lacks a sense of color and vibrancy,
those whose sense of God does not bring them
the joy that it might if they could perceive
the full spectrum of God’s love for the world. 
I suspect that this might describe many of us:
we can recite the creed without crossing our fingers,
but our faith can feel faded and drab,
we feel like we’re missing something.

“Not as man sees does God see.”
God sees the full spectrum:
the power of the weak,
the wisdom of the foolish,
the blessedness of those who are hungry,
who are poor and meek, 
mourning and persecuted.
We might see more or less clearly,
more or less of the spiritual spectrum,
but even those of us who see best 
by the natural light of reason
are blind by comparison with God.
As Thomas Aquinas puts it, 
what our own ability to see shows us
is something perceived only by a few, 
and after much time and effort, 
and still mixed with many errors.

But thanks be to God Jesus has come
to share with us the light of grace and glory,
God’s own light that 
can take away our blindness,
can shows us a world that we, on our own,
can only imagine and hope for.
Washed in the waters of baptism,
filled with the Spirit,
fed at Christ’s banquet,
we have hope to see as God sees,
to see as the saints see:
a clarity that pierces through the fog of sin
to reveal a world saturated with the colors of grace.
“You were once darkness, 
but now you are light in the Lord.
Live as children of light.”

This is what our catechumens are seeking:
to live a children of the light.
Today, as they go through the rite of Scrutiny,
we pray that they may pass from darkness to light,
that they may be safe from error, doubt, and unbelief,
and that they may come one day to see God face to face.
And as we pray for them,
we ought also to pray for ourselves,
for we too are blind to all that grace can show us,
we too can find our faith grown drab and dull,
we too can lose hope to see God in the light of glory.

As we continue our Lenten pilgrimage
let us pray that God would shed his light upon us all
and that God, who is merciful, might have mercy on us all.

Lent 2

Readings: Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 9:28b-36

I was in Los Angeles the past few days
and for most of the time that I was there
it was cloudy and rainy, 
with highs in the mid-50s.
While I was disappointed to miss out 
on sunny California weather,
the native Californians seemed 
far more disconcerted than I was:
where had the sun gone?
What was this stuff falling from the sky?
Perhaps they felt like Peter, James, and John 
in today’s Gospel: “a cloud came 
and cast a shadow over them,
and they became frightened 
when they entered the cloud.”

But I suspect whatever consternation 
might have been felt by the Angelenos
was minor compared to the disciples
on the Mount of Transfiguration. 
Though the Transfiguration of Jesus
is ultimately about the revelation of divine glory
and the hope it engenders in us,
the path to this glory and hope 
seems to pass through darkness and fear,
for the “exodus” that Jesus speaks of 
with Moses and Elijah
will prove to be his passage 
through suffering and death 
to new life on Easter Morning.
For the disciples, the Transfiguration 
is a moment of realization 
that they are lost in a wilderness
and confronted by the living God.
We hear something similar 
in the account of God’s appearance to Abram:
“As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram,
and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.”
The promised land and offspring are to come,
but first Abram must sit in fearsome darkness
amid dismembered animals and carrion-eating birds.
On the journey to the land of promise,
divine glory sometimes looks to us
like cloud and darkness and perplexity. 
Pope Leo the Great, 
commenting on the Transfiguration,
says, “The way to rest is through toil,
The way to life is through death.”

Of course, we in the Church 
hear and say these sorts of things all the time,
and sometimes we reduce them to platitudes like
“you’ve got to carry the cross to wear the crown,” or
“God never closes a door without opening a window.”
These kinds of things make sense,
until, that is, you find yourself enshrouded
in a deep terrifying darkness.
You receive a frightening medical diagnosis
and you don’t know what the days and weeks will bring.
The work that gave you meaning and purpose is taken from you
and it is not clear if you will find anything to replace it.
Your beloved parish closes 
and you wonder if you will ever 
find a new spiritual home.
“The way to rest is through toil,
The way to life is through death.”
But now you are forced to ask yourself:
do I really believe this?
Can this really be true?
Is there rest on the other side of toil?
Is there life on the other side of death?

One way to think about Lent 
is that it is a time of God 
training our vision
so that we can glimpse his glory
even within the cloud,
even amid the deep terrifying darkness.
Writing to the Philippians, 
Paul criticizes those for whom,
as he strikingly puts it,
“their God is their stomach.”
That one certainly hits close to home.
How much time do I spend amassing things
that I think will satisfy my deepest cravings?
How many things or achievements do I grasp
in the hope that they will afford me security,
that they will allow me to avoid pain,
that they will keep fear and loss at bay?
But then the cloud descends
and a deep terrifying darkness envelops me
that no thing or achievement can illuminate.

Through practices of prayer, fasting, and charity,
Lent calls us to not let our minds 
be occupied with earthly things.
Not because earthly things are not important,
but because we can see their true value
only in the light of eternity,
only in the light cast by the transfigured Jesus. 
The fear and anxiety and loss that come
from our attachment to earthly things
cannot be magicked away by platitudes 
about crosses and crowns 
and doors and windows;
illness and uncertainty and mourning are real
and we should not pretend that they are not.
But God is more real.
The love of Jesus is more real.
The power of the Spirit is more real.
Lent invites us to loosen our grip
on our fear and anxiety and loss
so that Christ can take all these things 
into his heart,
and carry them with him in his toil
so that we can find rest,
carry them with him through his death
so that we can find life.

It is precisely because 
fear and anxiety and loss are real
that we must place them in the heart of Jesus,
for it is through his toil that we find our rest,
it is through his death that we find our life.
He has entered the cloud 
and the terrifying darkness
so that he can be our light.
Let us allow God this Lent
to bear our burdens
and show us the light of his mercy
so that God in his mercy
might have mercy on us all.

Lent 1

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13

Temptation is often a subtle thing.
If it works the way the devil intends,
you may not even know you’re being tempted.
In our Gospel today,
temptation takes a fairly dramatic form:
Satan appearing and speaking directly to Jesus.
Perhaps he knew that Jesus 
would be able to see through any ruse,
and so he thought he might as well 
take a direct approach.
But with us, temptation rarely if ever
takes such an obvious form.

Think about it:
you start out in your life’s work 
with high ideals, firm principles,
and a desire to make the world a better place,
but then there comes the pay raise
or the promotion,
or the recognition,
or the power,
and all you are asked to do
is to lower your ideals just a tad,
to bend your principles just a little,
to make yourself just slightly less
than that person you set out to be
and one day you find
that there is nothing you will not do
to keep your pay or position or notoriety or power,
that your life has become 
only about you and your ambitions.

Or you and your spouse begin life together
promising to love, honor, and cherish
until you are parted by death,
but then comes routine and a bit of boredom
and distractions and other people and things
in which to invest your time,
and one day you find
that those promises you made
seem like something said by someone else,
and you no longer feel bound by your vows,
no longer feel bound
to love or honor or cherish.

Or you have a moment 
of profound certainty that God is real 
and that God’s reign is the pearl of great price 
for which you should give your all,
but then the feeling begins to fade,
and other things—
things good and worthy in themselves—
begin to assert their own claims on your life,
and in the busy hours of your day 
prayer gets crowded out,
and you tell yourself it is enough to make it
two Sundays out of four to Mass,
or you say you don’t really need 
the sacrament of reconciliation,
since you can settle your sins with God yourself,
and one day you find
that you can’t remember the last time
that you took a moment to pray,
or to receive Christ in the sacraments,
or to examine your conscience
and reckon with your sins,
and God seems like a once close friend
with whom you have lost touch.

No drama.
No devil with horns offering you
riches or power or glory
in exchange for you soul.
Just fleeting thoughts 
like water dripping on a stone,
tiny temptations that gradually
wear away your soul.
And one day you will look around
and no longer remember who you were
and what and who you once loved
and why you tried to live a life
that was about something more than yourself.

And the worst part is,
living this diminished life won’t even bother you;
it will seem natural and normal.

Lent is a call to face these temptations
and to return to ourselves,
to rediscover the convictions and desires
with which we set out on our journey,
above all our commitment
to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. 

It is for us what the offering of firstfruits were
for the ancient Israelites.
As described in the book of Deuteronomy,
this was not simply a sacrificial ritual
but the occasion to recall who they were
and who God had been for them:
“we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers,
and he heard our cry and saw our affliction.”
It was a call to gather themselves 
together once more before the face of God
and bow down in worship and gratitude.

So too for us, 
Lent must be the occasion to recall who we are
by hearing the Word who has drawn near us,
the occasion to confess with our mouths 
that Jesus is Lord
and to believe in our hearts 
that God raised him from the dead,
and to let that Word dwell within us
so that our diminished selves 
might be enlarged.

This might sound dramatic,
but grace is typically no more dramatic 
than temptation is.
If temptation rarely takes the form 
of a horned devil blandishing enticements before us,
grace rarely takes the form 
of a shining angel grasping us by the hand.
Grace too is something that manifests itself
in the everyday events of our journey through life.
It too is like drops of water on a stone:
present in smalls acts of selflessness,
seemingly trivial gestures of love,
stolen moments of prayer,
the day-by-day ordinary life of the Christian,
the week-by-week celebration 
of Christ’s death and resurrection,
the year-by-year return to God in which
we offer small sacrifices with great love.
Rather than wearing away the true self 
that God has called us to be,
these tiny drops of grace 
transform and refresh us,
they make our souls blossom forth in beauty,
the first fruits of the harvest of God’s reign.

Let us pray that God would grant us a holy Lent
in which we turn from temptation
and bow down before the Lord who has loved us,
that the drops of grace would water
the parched land of our souls,
and that God in his mercy
would have mercy on us all.