Moving from Blindness to Light

Dear friends,

There is something particularly unsettling about blindness. It is not just the physical inability to see but the vulnerability that comes with it. The way a blind person reaches out with hesitant hands, searching for something solid to hold onto. Blindness robs us of feelings and of seeing the beauty of which nature and our world are made.

This Sunday’s reading presents us with the uncomfortable truth that we are all, in some way, blind. We suffer from so many kinds of blindness, and the most dangerous ones are the blindnesses we do not know we have. The characters in the reading displayed it in one way. There is ideological blindness. When we see the world through the narrow lens of our own convictions, convinced that we alone see clearly. Anyone who disagrees with us is not just wrong but foolish, or worse, malicious. We can also suffer from communicative blindness. We speak past each other rather than to each other. We listen not to understand, but to reply. We assume we know what the other person means before they have finished speaking. We see their words through the filter of our own hurts and assumptions.

Then there is relational blindness when we fail to see the pain in others’ eyes or the sufferings of the poor or those heavily burdened by life’s challenges. We are present in body but absent in attention. And we do not see the ones closest to us slowly fading into the background. Then we have perhaps the most stubborn of all, self-blindness. We do not know our own hearts. We justify our anger as righteous indignation. It could manifest in arrogance, pride, and envy. And then there is the highest blindness, the one from which all others flow: the blindness of sin. Sin darkens the soul. It distorts our perception of God, of others, and of ourselves. It convinces us that we are fine, that we have no need of a Saviour, that we see perfectly well.

On this fourth Sunday of Lent (Laetare Sunday), we are not without hope, and this is the good news: Jesus is the light of the world. It is a course to be joyful. Jesus is not a teacher who points to the light. Not a prophet who describes the light. He is the light. May we come to him, letting him touch our eyes, and trust that he is leading us into light. May his light shine upon us and open our eyes to his presence in every person we meet. Amen.