Brothers and sisters in Christ—
Today the Gospel centers on the theme of blindness versus the theme of light. Blindness in the terms of the Gospel, is the unwillingness to accept the destiny that is offered to us in Christ. It is the unwillingness to accept the God’s invitation to share His Life, and grow into His Divine Nature. Blindness is the rejection of the vocation of God to each human being to become God by grace. On account of this definition of blindness, the Lord Jesus exclaimed that He came into the world to give sight to those who were blind, but to take away the sight of those who could see. When the Pharisees countered with the statement: “So then, we are blind?” The Lord clarifies His point: “If you were blind, you would have no sin, but because you say ‘We see,’ your sin remains.” In others words, the blindness that rejects the life of God is a willful blindness. God freely offers Himself in friendship to the human being, and the human being says “no.”
Light and sight, on the other hand, are images of Christ Himself, as He is possessed in His identity by each and every human being that accepts the call to salvation. The person who accepts the invitation of God in Christ, is transformed within, so that he has a mind and insight no longer merely his own, but God’s. He is able to see the universe and especially his fellow human beings in the way that God sees them. Thus, by means of his incorporation into Christ through the Mysteries, he becomes capable of compassion and love. The Fathers of the Church continuously use the natural image of a log in the fire. Any who have sat by a campfire, a bonfire, or even their fireplace, has observed the moment at which a certain log in the fire becomes completely imbued with fire, to the extent that it is impossible to discern where the log ends and the fire begins, but all seem to one and the same. In the same way, the person who is conformed to Christ, who has become God by grace, is so completely imbued with God that it becomes increasingly difficult to discern which of his actions are his own and which are God’s. Many of the saints have been gifted with the power to work astounding miracles, and yet we know intuitively that the miraculous power does not come from them, but from the Lord. Seraphim of Sarov, in the nineteenth century, describes the goal of the Christian life as “the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.” In fact, in certain cases, the human soul has become so imbued with the grace of the Holy Spirit, that even the body has gained a remarkable radiance. For example, when St. Antony the Great emerged from the fortress in the Egyptian desert, where he has dedicated twenty years to prayer, his flesh shone with an unearthly light.
In a Gospel passage similar to the reading that we have for this Sunday, we find the Lord healing a blind man. When the man is healed, however, he sees imperfectly, he sees men moving around him, but they look like trees. The Lord Jesus applies His healing grace a second time to the man, and this time he recovers his sight and sees perfectly. This Gospel story shows forth the truth that our growth into Christ is not a one time event, but a process that requires the repeated action of the Lord, combined with a continuous commitment of our good will. Drawing near to the Lord in prayer and in His Life-Giving Sacraments is not a single event, but a friendship that deepens, grows and expands throughout our earthly life.
Receiving sight and light from the Lord, being conformed to the mind of God in Christ, gives us a natural abhorrence of all darkness. In this case, the precepts of the Lord are not external rules, but a natural way of life. The human being who draws near to the Lord in a life of prayer begins to act and think as the Lord acts and thinks. The closer he comes to the Lord in prayer, the more like the Lord he becomes in his thoughts and actions, because his mind, and even his body, are by degrees becoming deified by the action of the light that we call grace. It goes without saying that the closer he comes to the Lord, the greater his abhorrence for evil, ignorance and moral darkness. At the same time that his hatred for sin increases, his love and compassion for his fellow creatures increases to the extent that their salvation becomes as precious as his own.
A commitment to light and sight means a commitment to prayer and growth in our relationship with the Lord through the Divine Mysteries. We need to pray as much as possible, and pray more as prayer becomes more and more natural to us (using the words of the Gospel as the source and inspiration for our prayer).
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