Hopefully, since Ash Wednesday, every day we have done some penitential act. Hopefully, we have increased our daily prayer time. We have looked for extra ways that we can be charitable. And if you have not, we still have two and a half weeks of Lent. It’s never too late to start.
If your parish is using cycle A, you are hearing today about the man born blind. He is all of us. Because of original sin, we were all born blind. Only faith, which is itself a gift from God, and the grace of baptism can heal our blindness.
But truth be told, it never heals completely in this life. Only in dheaven Willy be have spiritual 20/20 vision. Part of our problem is that we think we see, we think we know, and we judge. We judge based on our partial vision.
Even for us who are baptized believers, St. Paul tells us,
Now we see dimly as in a mirror, then [in heaven] we will see face to face.
It is our partial blindness that can often lead us to sin. We think see. We think we know. We think we know what we need. We think we know what is best for us. We don’t. We need to keep the limits of our vision in mind.
Firstly, to remind us that we need a guide. We need to pray every day for the Holy Spirit to help us to see, to help us to know, to help us choose wisely.
Also, we need to remeber our partial vision whenever we judge another person. We need to remind ourselves that we never see the whole picture. Only God sees that.
As we age our physical eyesight fails just a bit more. Let us pray that as our physical eyesight fail, God may increase our spiritual eyesight.
