What does it mean to be blind? There is a documentary that came out recently on the Disney Channel and it’s called “Blink”. The documentary is about a husband and wife from French-speaking Canada and they have four children. It starts off with the family in the eye doctor’s office. It’s at that moment that they come to the realization and discovery that three of their four children have an inherited disease that will cause them to go completely blind by the middle of their lives. The parents are obviously shocked by this, and they don’t know how to even respond, so they asked the doctor, “What can we do?” He said, “There’s no cure for this. Your children will go blind. The best thing that you can do is try to fill their minds with images. Go home, open the encyclopedia and show them what zebras are, show them what giraffes are. Fill their minds with images while you still can, so that when they go blind, they will have all of these images in their memory.”
The family begins doing this and the husband and wife see that it’s a little bit boring for the kids. They thought, we’ve always wanted to travel, and providentially the husband’s business was sold right around that time. They decided that they would take a year and they would travel around the world and try to give their kids every experience that they could see. They asked their children to make a bucket list of what things they wanted to see. They all began brainstorming and coming up with the bucket list. They went around the world for a year, and they saw all of these sites. The children all wanted to see a safari so they went to Africa and saw amazing animals there. One of them wanted to ride a camel while drinking a juice box, so they went to Egypt and he got to drink a juice box on an camel. They got to see the sunrise in the Himalayas. They went all around the world to give their kids as many experiences and as many memories as they could of all the beauty in the world.
The youngest one was five years old and he did not realize what going blind meant. He knew he was going to go blind, but he did not know what it meant. He said to his mother, “Mom, what does it mean to go blind?” When he asked that question it put an arrow in her heart, she was so grieved by this reality. She tried to explain it in simple terms. She said, “When you go blind it’s like when you close your eyes and you can’t see anything but then you don’t open them again.”
That’s what blindness is in the physical realm. But what is blindness in the spiritual realm? What is the blindness that Jesus came to give sight to? Blindness in the spiritual realm is sin. And in our lives, we can go blind. We have the potential to go blind unless we take care of ourselves, unless we do what Jesus gives us in order to see.
In the Gospel today we hear that He restores sight to the blind man. It is interesting because as the Gospel progresses, first he sees Jesus as just somebody he encounters. Then he realizes that this guy might be a prophet. As he gets to know him more and the miracle begins to happen, he says, “The man who is called Jesus.” By the end of it he realizes and he is able to say, “It is the Lord.” There’s a progression in his revelation of his sight into Jesus.
That is true for each and every one of us. In Baptism you were washed clean from sin. We were completely restored to the life of grace. Sometimes it takes our entire lives to come to know Jesus. Not just that He is a prophet or not just people call him Jesus but to actually realize He is our Lord, my Lord, your Lord and He came to free us from our sins.
Think about those parents in that documentary when they had to explain to their children that they would never be able to see again. They were so grieved by that. God the Father is so grieved by any sin that we endure. He is so grieved by this potentiality that we too might go blind. He is so grieved by that that he would send Jesus into the world to suffer and die and rise to give us light.
First, it’s important to realize that in Baptism we have been given this wonderful miracle of sight. The miracle sight is faith. But throughout our lives, there can be moments where we allow ourselves to become blinded. This is sin in our lives.
St. Paul says in the in the Second Reading that there are deeds of darkness that we can participate in. These deeds of darkness blind us to the grace of God. He has this wonderful line where he says, “expose the deeds of darkness to the light, that when we expose the darkness in our lives, the sins in our lives, the shame in our lives, when we bring it to the light our sight is restored.” We are given the wonderful sacrament of Confession for that, to expose any sin in our lives to the light.
I think it’s really important that we realize that if there’s any sin in our lives, if there’s anything that we have been too ashamed of to bring to the light, or too afraid of to bring to the light, that can haunt us. Satan can prey upon us with that sin or with that memory.
The second thing would be to live this Sacramental life, to live the life of Confession where we bring things to the light, where we come to the Eucharist and receive His Body and Blood.
Then the third thing like those children, is to try and expose ourselves to as much grace as we can. Just as the parents would show them pictures or take them all over the world to give them these images of beauty and creation, when we come to Mass, it is like a fire hose of grace. We hear His voice through all the readings; we see Him as we receive the Body and Blood of our Lord.
But then we go out into the world. Think about how often we are looking at images that are other than Jesus. The average amount of screen time for the average person is now eight-and-a-half hours. We spend eight-and-a-half hours on screens. I say that because we have to have images. We have to have memories. We have to have experiences of grace not only here at the Eucharist but throughout our week.
As we celebrate this Laetare Sunday and we come closer to Easter, just think, throughout your week, am I looking at goodness? Am I looking at beauty? Am I exposing myself to truth or am I exposing my eyes to sin? One of the greatest ways that we can see and experience God is in Eucharistic Adoration. Because when the Eucharist is exposed in the monstrance (monstrance means to see) we see the Eucharist. We are letting Him fill us with his light and fill us with his grace because we will go through dark valleys. There will be times in our life when our faith is tested beyond belief. If we have these memories to hold on to, if we have this grace to hold on to, He will see us through.
As we celebrate this Laetare Sunday, take a moment to reflect on that. Is there any darkness in my life? Is there any area of my life that does need to be exposed so that I don’t go blind? How can I most fill my life, fill my vision, fill my senses with the grace of God so that I can truly live as a child of the light. No longer blind but able to see.
