What's Above YOUR Door? — Blessings at Epiphany Time
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In today’s Gospel [https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/111725.cfm ] a blind man comes before Jesus, who asks him what he wants of Him. “Please let me see,” he replies, and the Lord gives him his vision.
The man’s request is a prayer for all of us. We may not be physically blind but each of us can honestly make that prayer his own: “please let me see.”
The Jesuit end-of-day practice of Examen is not simply an examination of conscience, a remembering of how we have sinner in thought and word, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. It is broader. The Examen asks one to look at one’s entire day – all of it, good, bad, and seemingly indifferent – trying to see what God was doing in my life in all those moments. For the Examen to be effective, however, it cannot be about us putting our ideas on God’s lips. Rather, as the blind man’s prayer goes: “please let me see.” Please let me see myself, Lord, as You see me.
God, who is Truth, sees us as we are, not as we think we are. The classical definition of truth is the correspondence of thought and reality. Notice that understanding assigns primacy to reality, not thought: ideas do not make reality. (This is a major flaw, for example, in gender theory). If we are willing to see ourselves as God sees us, we see truth. If we insist on seeing ourselves as we do and calling that truth, well, that’s just what Jesus warned against when he spoke to the Pharisees after healing the man born blind: “but now that you say ‘we see,’ your sin remains” (Jn 9:41).
“Please let me see!”
John Grondelski (PhD Fordham) was former associate dean of the School of Theology, Seton Hall University in New Jersey. He is a Catholic theologian with special interests in moral theology and the thought of St. John Paul II. All views are his own.
