Most of you have heard enough of my preaching that you won’t be surprised when I tell you that I don’t literalize this week’s gospel. For me, we lose something if we make it about only physical blindness and sight. We often hear this story and think of blindness and seeing in outward forms, but what about our inward blindness that leads us with the inability to truly see? I think this story is bigger than outward and physical blindness or sight, and I think it is very apropos with the political climate we find ourselves struggling with today. Do we actually see the pain we are causing to others? Do we really reject others, created in God’s likeness, so easily?
In the gospel, Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus says, “My teacher, let me see again.” Did you catch what he said? Bartimaeus wants to see “again” meaning that at one point in his life he had vision. There was a time when he could see. Jesus grants the request, but we learn that he did not regain the sight he originally had. It was a different way of seeing. Bartimaeus sees again, but in a new way? He now looks upward. He has a higher vision and a greater consciousness.
Do you ever feel like everyone except you has it figured out and is going somewhere? I’m talking about those times when it feels like life is passing us by and we aren’t getting anywhere. We feel stuck, more like a spectator of life than a participant. Maybe it’s about exhaustion or a lack of wholeheartedness. Maybe it’s despair, inertia, indifference. Maybe it feels like your life has been turned upside down and you’ve been displaced. Or, do you ever feel like you are begging for your life? I’m talking about those times when you feel depleted, the well has run dry, and you have nothing in reserve. It’s those times when life overwhelms us, and we wonder how or if we’ll get by. Somehow, we do get through it, but it often comes at a price.
Richard Rohr describes it as order, disorder, and reorder. My guess is that every one of us has lived that pattern. Isn’t that what happened to Bartimaeus? Isn’t that what happened to the Israelites? They went from Egypt to the wilderness, to the promised land. Each of those patterns is a story of life, death, and resurrection. I know because I have sat in deep darkness and begged God many times, but I came out from it a better person.
When have you sat in the darkness begging? When has blindness been your experience of life? When have you been sidelined? When have begging and pleading been the only prayer you had? When have you been Bartimaeus? What happened? And what have you done with that experience? Or better yet, what has it done with you?
That’s what sitting in darkness and begging has done for me. It continues to open my eyes. It continues to show me new paths for my life. It continues to help me see things in a new light. What if changing our lives and our world begins with changing how we see?
Father Jim