February 22, 2022 at 10:15 p.m.
As we near the beginning of Lent, let us not be ‘blind guides’
As we near the beginning of Lent, let us not be ‘blind guides’
The words of the Word of God, Christ Jesus, might seem harsh to our ears, but we need to be woken from the slumber that our sins and our innate judgmentalism have caused. Our gentle Jesus refers to all of us, not just those to whom he addresses in this parable, as “hypocrites,” “blind guides,” and in his hyperbolic manner, walking around with a huge wooden beam in our eye, all the while noticing the most minute splinter in the eye of our brother.
The American writer, Flannery O’Connor, who was a devout Catholic (as well as an avid student of Saint Thomas Aquinas), was fond of using a certain Southern Gothic style designed to shock her audiences into truly perceiving what was being said. O’ Connor states:
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” (Flannery O’Connor, Mysteries and Manners: Occasional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1969), 33-34.)
That is precisely what Our Blessed Lord, Jesus the Christ, is doing in the parable he gives to us for our reflection in Sunday’s Gospel. He’s trying to shock us, trying to “scare us straight,” so that we might be able to recognize what truly matters, to acknowledge what our Lenten campaign is really all about, “to repent and believe in the Gospel.”
Yes, we need to acknowledge that we, each in our own way, have failed to live up to the covenant of love established in the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord, Jesus. Each and every one of us sin; we turn away from the Love who is Jesus. Lent affords us the opportunity for deep reflection on our relationship with God. Sin is threefold alienation from God, others and ourselves. In the Holy Cross of Christ, we find threefold reconciliation. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is the surest way for us sinners to make our peace with God, others and in our souls. The surest sign of the covenant is the Eucharist, the Substantial Presence of Christ given to us in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There is no better time to get back to regular practice of confession than the Season of Lent; if we have been away from the Mass, come back to the greatest act of covenantal love other than the Eucharist.
This week, as we prepare to begin the spiritual campaign of Lent, perhaps we should examine what exactly are the fruits that we are producing in our lives. Are they of the Holy Spirit, namely charity, joy, benignity, goodness, patience, peace, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency and chastity? Saint Paul the Apostle tells us all about them in his Epistle to the Galatians 5:22-23 and the master theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas explains them clearly in his “Summa theologiae” (I.II.q. 70). These are all very accessible online for our further reflection.
Pray that this Lent will instruct us on how not to be blind guides, but women and men of the Spirit who bear good fruit in our lives.
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