Monday April 4, 2011

John 9:1-5

"As Jesus passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.'"

I will admit to not really knowing what Jesus means by the last bit of this verse. "Night is coming" - what does that mean? Honestly, it makes me think of the Dark Ages, but does He just mean His return to heaven? Because the disciples were certainly busy afterward. I don't know what's going on here. Help?

We had a discussion yesterday in the Doctrinal Session about the sacraments of Reconciliation and Anointing of the Sick. One of the people leading it got on a tangent about how in American society we don't seem to believe in sin - that it's all because your parents were mean to you back then or this trauma happened to you. I disagreed at the time - that I think the problem with the American view of sin is that there are not individual sins that are committed, there is only an inherent evil that could have possibly led to that individual sin. So if you have committed sin, it is because something about you or something that has infected you is inherently and irrevocably evil. And I think a lot of political debates end up hinging on WHAT that thing is rather than rejecting the premise.

I feel like I write a lot of things (an artistic recap of the Narnia movies for example) where I'm trying to write around this idea: reject the premise. When you're fed a hard religious line like - a man was born blind so thus he or his parents must have sinned, to pick an easy example - then don't start quibbling about whether or not future sins could be punished at birth or it's fair/unfair to punish children for the sins of the parents. Reject the premise. That's not how God works. Through Jesus' healing of this man, the glory of God was revealed.

More and more I feel like what Jesus really came down to do is just explain very basic stuff to us. However we would get it. 'Guys, look, stop hating each other and dividing yourselves into these meaningless groupings just so you can fight about it. Don't sin and start loving. God loves you, when you want to know what He wants in a given situation, start with that as the foundation of your argument.'

And here: reject the premise. All binaries are lies. The natural thing to follow here is: even good and evil. I'm not sure that's right though. I think the binary part is a lie. I think that good and evil are things that are at work in everyone. I think the people who deny that there is evil in them, deny it so hard that they start acting it out in "righteous" anger and hurting people. Embracing it isn't right either, so I don't know quite what my point is here. Perhaps it's that you can't be in control of something if you're not willing to admit that it is a part of you. You cannot control your reaction to trauma if you are not willing to admit that it is always something that you will carry with you. You cannot control your love if you are not willing to acknowledge it. You cannot control your dark impulses if you do not know that you have them and deal with them accordingly. We can always choose not to. The idea that we can't is an easy way out lie, but we don't have a prayer of pulling that off if we don't acknowledge the places we are most likely to fail.

And wow have I strayed from the point. More than usual.

But I think that we all have to take a step back from the issues and problems that we have going in the world. Step out of the rhetoric and the binaries and accept everything. Start to make sense of it anew. And you can lose your way in that kind of process VERY easily. All kinds of people have done so. Just like in the above argument I could feel the moment when part of me wanted to go into a "so neither good nor evil is real!" place. But of course they both are. Saying neither is real is just a cheat that will mean that both of them mess you up. That's why you have to have a solid baseline. God loves me and I love Him. Even if I can find no other reason to love all of my fellow men, I will love them for His sake. I would like that to be my baseline. I'm working on it.

What's hard about this process, even done properly, is that I think you're more like to find that both are true than that neither are. Both the man and his parents were guilty of sin in their lives. The reason the man was born blind was entirely different.

We really can't wrap our heads around all of this, can we? And I still don't know what the second part of Jesus' words in the verse meant.

I think this might be my most rambling and crazy blog post. Mondays are hard.

Dear Lord, help me to find my way. May I rely on Your wisdom rather than trying to force my own to be enough. Guide me, help me. I am lost. You are with me, thank You.