News from Sophia Christi

“The eye adores the visible world,” John O’Donohue wrote. “Once it opens, it is already the guest at an unending feast of vision….[It] falls in love with the… visible. This fascination is addictive; then almost immediately our amnesia in relation to the invisible sets in. We live in this world as if it had always been our reality and will continue to be….Fixated on the visible, we forget that the decisive presences in our lives—soul, mind, thought, love, meaning, time, and life itself—are all invisible.” John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 187-88.

That fixation on the visible prevents us from seeing beneath the surface of reality more often than not. And, more often than not, it leads us to believe our perspective is accurate and to mistrust those with a different point of view. Our opinions and actions are colored by the play of dark and light. Even the words I’m using are visual—color, dark, light, view, perspective. As O’Donohue says, the visual is captivating. It is covertly addictive. It seduces us to remain on the surface because we falsely believe if we can SEE something then we both KNOW it AND understand it. The problem is we don’t just SEE. We interpret and judge and form opinions about what we see and then, without knowing, we plunge ourselves into darkness and are totally blind. We think we see but all we are seeing are our own biases, opinions, anxieties and judgments.

This is the problem facing those poor Pharisees accompanying Jesus in John’s Gospel. “Are you saying we are blind,” they ask? And Jesus says “yes.” In believing they already ‘know’, they are making no effort to see what’s in front of them—that God is doing something new in Jesus. That the Spirit is working through him. The face of the Divine is staring them in the face and they can’t see it. So—yes—they are blind without realizing it! How often does this happen to us, I wonder? How often is God staring us in the face and we don’t know it? We think we know what’s happening but we are only seeing the top layer while God is looking up at us from below the surface, from the actual heart of the matter? (more…)

In Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ deep sensitivity to human suffering is quite obvious. He suffers ‘with’ the broken people he encounters. His emotions are real, visceral. He can be angry, sad, surprised and indignant, just like us, and when he is ‘moved with pity’ his own heart is wrenched, and tender compassionate acts follow. In her commentary on today’s reading, Mary McGlone says: “the [leper’s] request for healing stirred Jesus to his depths. Even before he could speak, his hand was reaching out, touching the man’s spurned and suffering body, transforming it with tenderness. Then, pronouncing the words that explained his gesture and made his will effective. Jesus said, “I do will it. Be made clean.”

I also imagine Jesus must have had a sense of humor. He couldn’t possibly feel such deep compassion without also experiencing the comical, even hilarious aspects of ordinary life. I like to think of Jesus out in the desert having a belly laugh with God after his encounter with the leper in Mark’s Gospel or over some ridiculous experience he’s had while preaching in the town. The leper story surely must have given them a laugh. Here’s this guy who has been isolated from family and friends for who knows how long, possibly with sores all over his body, and he gets up the courage to do something that is absolutely forbidden. He comes right up to Jesus, comes within inches, in fact, and begs to be healed. He must be pretty desperate, right?

And when Jesus sees him his own insides convulse with empathy. He reaches out his hand, does another forbidden thing by touching the man, and says with deep feeling, “yes, I do will it. Be healed.” And the leprosy vanishes. Then Jesus STERNLY orders the man to tell no one, but to go immediately to the priest and do what is required by law to prove he’s clean so he can return to his family and friends. And what does this guy do? He runs around town telling everyone he meets what just happened to him. He didn’t follow the rules before and doesn’t follow Jesus’ strict orders now. I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes and shaking his head in disbelief as he watches the man take off running, wildly excited, not for a minute remembering what he was just told to do! Now Jesus can’t go anywhere, can’t freely walk in and out of the city without people falling all over him! So he goes out into the desert to get a little space and tells God what just happened. They both have a good laugh. “Geez!” says Jesus. “What have I done now, dad?” (more…)