It is a thrill to encounter a master of reading. There is a fine vivacity of mind and character that comes through in this gift.
Yesterday I attended a Lenten retreat on the lovely campus of the Church of our Savior, San Gabriel, California, hosted by the Program Group on LGBT Ministry, which I belong to, and conducted by Bishop Mary Glasspool. The retreat itself was conceived in just the right way: a friendly, even intimate sense among the participants, but socializing not encouraged. It was about rest, silence, and exploration. I can still feel that aura with pleasure.
What I did not expect was the lively series of attacks on scripture on which we were feasted. (By “attack,” I don’t mean something hostile, but the fact that the texts were seized on and shaken, put to a rigorous test of meaning.) It is particularly hard to read the Bible in new ways, because the passages get so encrusted with the things we have been told about them over our lifetimes.
Think of this as a teaser.
One of the texts was John 9:1-38, the healing of the man blind from birth. It is easy to take this text as a profound but simple dramatic narrative. The dialectic of blindness and insight has been held up as central to literary experience; in this case, when the blind man sees, what he sees is not just the world bathed in light, but the Light of the World. It is simple, and it is everything: an archetype of awakening and conversion. Throughout the aftermath, this unsophisticated and nameless man repeats, wondering, in different forms: I was blind, and now I see.
Ah, Bishop Mary points out, but the aftermath is anything but simple. Press slightly on the surface, and the great compressed intricacies of the Gospel come roiling out.
It turns out that the great difficulty here is not for the blind man to see, but to see that the blind man sees. The healing was the easy part. Processing, digesting, accepting it proves all but impossible, and people do everything they can to escape.
As Bishop Mary frames it, it is a dramatic act in six scenes: Jesus is actually present only in the first and the last scenes; in the others, the event is interrogated in different ways by different constituencies. First, the blind man’s neighbors debate whether it is really him. It certainly looks like him, they say, but he appears to have his vision. It must be someone like him. I am the one who was blind, the man insists, but they continue to debate. Next, the man is taken to the Pharisees. They assume that this was in fact the blind man, and ask how the healing occurred. The man tells them. They respond, “What? On the Sabbath? That’s a sin!” This leads to a dilemma, since if the healer was a sinner he couldn’t heal, if he was a healer he couldn’t be a sinner, so something is wrong. They decide to call in the parents to confirm that this was indeed the man born blind. The parents say, yes, this is our son, and yes, he appears now to have his sight, but they are afraid of getting into trouble, and won’t go any further. So, the Pharisees call back the man himself and challenge him again. At this point, the man stands up for himself and speaks out plainly against the illogic of the Pharisees, saying, in effect, that if they will not believe their own eyes, he at any rate has no choice but to do so. In the last scene, Jesus finds the man again and helps him easily in the final step of belief.
So, Bishop Mary says, it is not just sight but voice, not just sight but insight.
Is there any doubt that we are the ones refusing miracle? Note that the disciples are practically as obtuse as the Pharisees in this episode. How often what we think of as “belief” is, in subtle ways, a matter of simply accepting a reality that is before our eyes.
See Bishop Mary in a recent Just Action video on juvenile justice.
