30thSunday in Ordinary Time: 10/25/15—all Masses
These are my glasses. I’ve worn glasses since I was in sixth grade which would have been back in 1960, and I have worn contact lenses since 1971. Even though it’s been 55 years ago, I still remember how I came to know that I needed to wear glasses like these.
My sister, Dianne, came home one day from school with a note from her teacher suggesting that my parents take her to an eye doctor because the teacher was concerned that Dianne couldn’t read the blackboard. My mom took Dianne to the optometrist, and, sure enough, Dianne came home with a pair of glasses. Being a very inquisitive big brother, I was curious to see what it was like to see with glasses so I asked her if I could take a peak. When I put those glasses on, I was absolutely amazed at what I could see. It was like a whole new world opened up for me, and I had no idea what I had been missing. I thought everyone saw things as fuzzily and indistinctly as I did. Like St. Paul, it was as if scales had fallen from my eyes. Because I was so amazed by what I could see by wearing Dianne’s glasses, I immediately told my mom that I thought I needed glasses too, again now some 55 years ago.
Today’s Gospel is about the blind beggar Bartimaeus. There were all sorts of things that could cause blindness back 21 centuries ago: glaucoma, cataracts, infection, accidents, detached retina, macular degeneration, near-sightedness, far-sightedness, even having so-called “dry eye” caused by a proper lack of fluid on the eye, and the like. Now some 21 centuries, fortunately we have all sorts of medications, surgical procedures, and mechanisms so we can physically see much better than Bartimaeus and his fellow citizens of the First Century. However, while we have conquered physical blindness, spiritual blindness is still alive and well as we humans, in our time, can be blind to the beauty of the created world God gives us, blind to the beauty of human life at all its stages, blind to the beauty of committed married sexuality, blind to the uniqueness and diversity of the humans both friend and foe who surround us, blind to the complexity of the physical things we have surrounding us, blind to wonder of God’s love for us and presence with us.
Whenever we go to the eye doctor, we have to read an eye chart with all those combinations of letters of the alphabet in order to see how clearly we are seeing. Spiritually, God gives us such an eye chart for us to check our spiritual vision; it’s called the Sermon on the Mount, chapters 5 through 7 of St. Matthew’s Gospel. It is a truly wonderful summary of the whole of Jesus’ message, the whole of Jesus’ life. Please make it a point to read that spiritual eye-chart regularly, much more regularly than we read the optometrist’s eye chart. Unless we do take the time to read it regularly, we are like the pre-glasses Jim Benz, thinking that we can see perfectly as we are, not realizing how fuzzily we are actually seeing our world, fuzzily seeing the people around us, and evenfuzzily seeing our God.
When we like Bartimaeus regularly need to cry out, “Lord, I want to see,” then Jesus will begin to cure our vision, will help us to see with new eyes, so that we can see with a clarity and a precision that we would not have at first thought imaginable, just like the pre-glasses Jim Benz.