Colour Blindness

Christmas Octave: Feast of St John the Evangelist (27 December 2018)

1 John 1:1-4. Psalm 97:1-2, 5-6, 11-12. John 20:2-8.

“He saw and believed.”

The apostle John saw and believed. But it is also true that he believed and then he saw. True belief begets true vision. If John saw the empty tomb, and the things within it, and then believed in Jesus' resurrection as today's gospel tells us, it is also true that John's belief and attachment to the Lord helped him see reality as it is. He was able to see that Jesus was alive. Alive, though really dead. He was able to see that it was a living person that he was searching for in the empty tomb. All because he had faith in Jesus, because he loved him and knew him. Faith gives birth to true seeing.

But as all religions and spiritualities tell us, we humans don't see that well. Many a human person has colour blindness or some kind of blindness—prejudice, bias, petty-mindedness, narrow-mindedness—that distort their vision. Therefore, we need to learn how to see. Otherwise we can make up reality, we can have hallucinations, believe in illusions, or we can live in an unreal world.

We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. That's why we need to learn how to see. Praying is a beautiful way of learning how to see. A prayerful mind does not tell us what to see; but it teaches us how to see what we behold.

Very often we choose blindness over true seeing. We don't have the courage to meet reality as it is, or to encounter the pain and the confusion that reality could invariably bring. We close our minds to reality, and even become experts in selective seeing. Prayer and our attachment to the Lord can help us break the distortions within us. They can give us the courage to meet persons as they are, accept them as they are. They can give us the needed broad-mindedness and fortitude to meet reality in all its disorder, and even accept reality as it is.

We need the gift of new eyes, that our Lord is ever willing to give us. We need His gift to see this moment as it is. Only with His vision we will be able to see properly and better, without dictating to reality how it should be. The more open we are to the Spirit's promptings and invitations within us, the wider our seeing becomes. (Isn't this prayer itself?)

There is nothing that is not holy or not beautiful, for those who have learned how to see. The whole wide world becomes one Big Temple. Everything becomes sacred, and filled with God. Everything becomes filled with His goodness and mercy. Even our inner lives. Even the confusion and the disorder within us becomes beautiful and holy, becomes filled with God if we have learned true seeing.

Our God is ever ready to give the ability to stand back and calmly observe our inner dramas, without rushing to judgment. This is foundational for spiritual seeing. The God in us thus is able to meet the God in the world; the divine in us sees the divine in the world.