Dear Parish Family,
The Oliver Sacks case study that inspired the movie "At First Sight" tells the story of a man who has grown accustomed to blindness, and then is offered an operation that will restore sight. The moment when the bandages are removed to have sight suddenly thrust upon him was a dismaying experience. The message of the movie is that the more important organ in vision is not the eyeball but the mind. That disconnect between the physiological and the psychological unnerves him. The Gospel account of the curing of the blind man is a multidimensional miracle that brings sight and faith to the blind person and exposes the ‘spiritual blindness’ and fanatical hate towards the person of Christ the healer.
The richness of human seeing prompts us to use that experience metaphorically to refer to understanding, as in “Do you see what I'm saying?” The same reality has led many religious writers, including our four evangelists, to use vision as a metaphor for faith. While all levels of the New Testament tradition affirm that Jesus healed persons from physical blindness, the evangelists are not content to simply relay that physical fact. They invariably tell such healings in a way that invests them with a symbolic dimension.
This Sunday's Gospel account about the man born blind is the showcase example of seeing as a symbol of believing. We know that this symbolic dimension resides in the narrative and not simply in our imagination because of the clues the evangelist embeds in the story. For example, Jesus' statement, “I am the light of the world,” calls attention to a theme already established in John's prologue when he speaks of the life of the Word as light that shines in the darkness and which the darkness has not overcome. In that context we are all born blind spiritually, and we do not really see the fullness of reality until we are enabled by baptism and faith to see by the light of Christ, “the light of the world.” Believing is the deepest kind of seeing. Like physical vision, it is not simply a given ability; it is also something that we have to learn to use.
The drama of John 9, the belittling of a person of faith still continues today. We go to work, to school, and the so-called intellectuals belittle us because we are people of faith. But those who mock us cannot answer the questions that matter: What is life really about? What is the purpose for all of our struggles? Can lasting happiness ever be found? And the common everyday woman or man, the elderly lady who devotes her life to prayer, the young family who makes tremendous sacrifices to provide a Catholic home for their children, the Teen who stays away from the party everyone is talking about because he or she knows there is going to be abundant amounts of alcohol and drugs there, these are the people the arrogant call blind. But these everyday people, everyday prophets who are real ‘seers/see-ers’ - the people who have sight. They see that life is about God who gave us life. We exist to love, honor and serve Him. With God as our center, every aspect of our life has meaning and purpose. The spiritual is real. Happiness does exist. It comes from union with God in the person of Christ.
Fr. Tom Kunnel C.O.