Even those blinded by doubt can see through the signs of Mercy

Even those blinded by doubt can see through the signs of Mercy

It isn’t always the gift of vision that sustains our sight of what the Lord created within our soul  when doubt appears; and the evil one takes advantage of our weakness to change any perspective towards faith.

God speaks to man through the visible creation.  The material cosmos is so presented to man’s intelligence that he can read there traces of its Creator.  Light and darkness, wind and fire, water and earth, the tree and its fruit speak of God and symbolize both his greatness and his nearness.  (CCC 1147).

St. Paul told us that we “walk by faith not by sight,” yet it is through the sight of the Lord, God, that we find his presence.  (2 Cor 5: 7).  

The sacred image, the liturgical icon, principally represents Christ.  It cannot represent the invisible and incomprehensible God, but the Incarnation of the Son of God has ushered in a new “economy” of images.  (CCC 1159).  Previously God, who has neither a body nor a face, absolutely could not be represented by an image.  But now that he has made himself visible in the flesh and has lived with men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God…and contemplate the glory of the Lord, his face unveiled.  (St John Damascene).

Blindness does not always indicate the inability to see through normal retinas and other crucial organs that relate to the brain’s opportunity to register any item that passes by us.  It can become the most crucial aspect of understanding what just appeared in our vision of faith.  Here is what can cripple our spiritual connection with the very essence of God’s grace to save our belief in the Passion of his Son, Jesus Christ.

There is always an absence of finding and absorbing the gift of what we hold as truth when it comes to understanding what faith really is.  Unfortunately, life doesn’t give us an opportunity to make a choice when more than one event is present at the same time and the wrong decision can take us down; sometimes without ever finding the most crucial truth in our spiritual journey.

The Church remains faithful to the interpretation of "all the Scriptures” that Jesus gave both before and after his Passover: “Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter his glory?”  Jesus’ sufferings took their historical, concrete form from the fact that he was “rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes,” who handed “him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified.”  (CCC 572)  

Faith can therefore try to examine the circumstances of Jesus' death, faithfully handed on by the Gospels and illuminated by other historical sources, the better to understand the meaning of the Redemption.  (CCC 573).

Let us become informed with the truth that what we see through the eyes of faith is the grace with which our spiritual blindness is quickly removed and the sight we behold is God’s grace.

Ralph B. Hathaway