What was the blind man – in today’s Gospel – really looking for?
Luke tells us that he wants pity from our Lord … he wants to “see.”
But see what?
His family? His friends? Birds of the sky? A sunrise?
Perhaps, like all of us, his true blindness was an inability to see the salvation that had been promised. He wanted to see that salvation. He wanted to see his future. He wanted to know that there was more than this hard life he had been living – this bad hand he had been dealt.
Don’t we all want that sight?
Don’t we all want to know that when we close our eyes forever, we will awaken to a new state of being – heaven, you might say – where our loved ones have been waiting to greet us and comfort us on our journey?
Isn’t that we all want to see and to know?
To know that all that we do, all that we love or hate, all the struggles we have … are not for nothing?
Funny … when we first come to our faith, it’s hardly a question at all. We are so on fire!
When the flames of faith first blaze within a person’s heart, they burn like a forest fire. Everything is aglow … nothing is too small to be caught up in the fire that suddenly burns from within.
Here is my story.
My flames were roaring at one point in my life.
I was born Catholic – a “cradle Catholic” as they say – but like many people of all faiths, I chose to follow a path that went in a different direction; all kinds of directions – very few of which were leading me to a relationship with God.
Money. Power. Lust. Success, in the eyes of society … they were the only things that mattered.
Like a lost soul hitchhiking toward a bitter end, these passions DROVE ME … rather than ME doing the driving.
Or better yet, handing it over to GOD and letting Him sit behind the wheel.
But, over time, I came to my senses. There came a point when I stopped chasing after things I thought would make me happy.
Instead, I chased after the Lord.
They call this a “renewal.”
I went through this phase nearly 20 years ago. And I fell hard, in a good way.
I suddenly feasted on daily meditations of the Holy Rosary; faithful recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours; getting up early for daily Mass – or if not, at least keeping up with the daily readings.
Spiritual retreats – many, many of those.
I was like a growing child, feasting on a well-balanced spiritual diet in order to continue to grow in my renewed faith.
Then … BAM!
I started to drift away from a steady diet of healthy options and began trending toward “fast food” options of faith.
Rosaries became less frequent. The daily Liturgy suffered valleys and peaks (mostly valleys) and long, thoughtful meditations became brief moments of thought in between checking my e-mails and looking at social media.
It’s a very noisy world out there and it can be a struggle to stay focused on that well-balanced diet of spiritual food. At least it was for me.
Like many, this drift away from those early flames would eventually be corrected over time … only to drift again and again.
It’s a daily struggle … a lifelong struggle.
But we continue to try.
In our first reading today from the Book of Revelations – that prophetic text filled with rich, haunting imagery that has been so misunderstood and incorrectly characterized over the years – there contains a bit of simple, basic prophecy from our Lord.
In the reading, Jesus scolds us for becoming complacent in our faith. Even though we have done well and we continue to say the right things, Jesus knows how easily our internal flames can be doused.
“… you have lost the love you had at first.
Realize how far you have fallen.
Repent, and do the works you did at first.
Otherwise, I will come to you
and remove your lamp stand from its place, unless you repent.”
Such powerful words.
We have “lost the love” we had at first. Our flames have died out and our hearts are starting to grow cold.
We must “realize how far (we) have fallen” … and that’s not easy because the world is filled with wonderful “creature comforts” that make us feel warm and snuggly.
But warm and snuggly is not always a good thing. It can lead us down a wrong path.
Even a frog is warm and snuggly as it sits in a pot of water, waiting for the boil that will eventually kill him.
Sometimes, we have to choose to walk away from the “warm snugglies” offered by this world and accept the cold reality that keeping our focus on heaven is simply not easy.
It reminds me of my journeys to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton lived and worked out his faith …
The monks in Bardstown – who rise each day before dawn (3:15 a.m.) to chant the Morning Hours – are well aware of the difficulty of getting out of a warm bed for the dark, cold confines of a church that only comes to life when the morning candles are lit and the Psalms are sung.
But, they also knew that if they had stayed in bed (the way I do too many times during the week) … the church would have remained cold all day.
Are we as Christians staying in bed too long?
Isn’t it time we tossed aside the world’s false blankets, jumped out of bed and started walking back to those flames that once filled us with so much warmth that we could stand naked before God?
Ah …
Therein lies the rub.
Whether we like it or not, we will be naked.
We WILL be naked.
Naked and without protection when we meet our maker, just as we were when he created us in the womb.
And that could be a cold day – that final, fateful day – if our flames are not burning from within.
A cold day indeed.
Perhaps it is time for me and for you to find that one thing … that one thing that keeps our flames aglow in a dark, lost world.
The reason we have hope in these times of darkness is because we know the answer. This is not a mystery.
We don’t have to sit on the side of a road, blinded by our lack of faith.
We know where to turn and Who to call.
We just need to take that first step … and then we need to find a way to stay on the path.
The Season of Advent is approaching … a perfect time to seek the renewal that God has been hoping you will choose.
Let us join our hearts and hands and do it together!
We are not alone.
And we are never without hope.
