Sunday 30 (B-2006):
Mirror of Faith
Mark 10:46-52
We don’t see things in their true meaning, in their true proportions,
unless we see them through the eyes of the true faith.
Remember that faith opens up to us the eyes, the
vision, of God himself.
What God sees and how God sees become available
to the believer when he truly and fully believes in God.
To believe fully and truly in God means to accept
totally and without conditions what God reveals to us of himself.
Faith does not give us just any understanding of God, but God’s very own understanding of himself.
It is this Catholic, i.e. total, revelation of
himself to us, to which the act of Catholic faith responds.
“Catholic” is not a label invented
by men. It is first of all an intrinsic quality of God himself.
Catholic means total, full, complete. There is
no fullness, no totality, no completeness greater than those of God himself.
And because God reveals himself in a “Catholic
way”, then the act by which we accept that revelation is also, and necessarily, Catholic.
Yet, it is true that we cannot understand God
to the extent God understands himself.
But faith at least tells us that there is an understanding
of God which outstrips the limits of our minds.
If you will, faith opens up the limited horizons
of our very limited minds to the limitless horizons of God himself.
The human mind is closed in on itself if faith
does not open it out.
Faith is to the mind as good soil, water and sunshine
are to a seed.
Faith opens out the mind like an evergreen, only
one which never stops growing.
Without faith, the human mind can only linger
in a stunted development.
That is why the apparent allergy of contemporary
Western civilization to the perspective of faith is such a dangerous thing, as Pope Benedict does not tire of saying.
By true faith, the believer not only receives as a gift a share in
God’s self-understanding. He also can begin to look at the world, mankind and, above all, himself from the perspective
of God.
Think what it must mean to understand yourself as God understands you! What liberation! What empowerment! What exultation!
The believer can begin to understand God’s
plan for creation, for society, for his own life.
He can see that the core of this plan is executed
above all by Jesus Christ and then, by Christ’s own will, by the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
He begins to see that he can only be sure he sees
with the eyes of God if he is united to Jesus, and that Jesus does not come alone, but with all others who believe in him,
in a family called the Catholic Church.
He sees that no believer can attribute to himself
or to herself an interpretation of the mind of God which is not in harmony with the Church’s interpretation.
Why is that so? Because God reveals his mind and
his heart above all through Jesus and Jesus has entrusted that revelation to his Apostles until he himself returns in glory
at the end of time.
He has given them the Spirit so that they may
not err in what pertains to the salvation of humanity.
This means we cannot fully understand the Church except from the perspective
of the Church’s own faith.
While the children of the Church have made many
terrible mistakes in the course of history, yet the Church cannot ultimately be understood or judged by history.
While the Church has played and continues to play
many diverse roles in society, she is not to be grasped only by sociology.
No human science or combination of human sciences
can claim an exhaustive analysis of the Church.
For the Church belongs to the Son of God, and
her deepest truth participates in the Mysteries of Christ.
The Church is simply another name for redeemed
humanity, endowed with gifts both charismatic and institutional, whose deepest truth is its gifted share in the eternal communion
of love of the Blessed Trinity through Jesus Christ.
Each one of us is, in the end, destined to find personal fulfillment
in that communion.
As believers, it is that destiny which must shape
our life in the world.
This vision of faith must be the inspiration of
our work in society, our critique of
society.
We should not let ourselves be confined within
the narrow concepts of party politics or ideological dogma.
It is the vision of faith which should inspire
our choices and define the shape of our love-filled commitment in the world.
If it is not, it means we are yielding our light
to the darkness.
Because we do not yet perceive the final glory
of humanity, we can be inclined to despair of the reality we do see around us.
We can give in to hopelessness and even “jump
on the bandwagon” of those who have no faith or of those who neglect it or dismiss it as “useless.”
Instead, we must be like the blind man of Jericho,
Bartimaeus.
He hoped for sight despite his plight. He raised
his voice in prayer to Jesus, despite the voices trying to silence him. He believed and he was healed.
The eyes of his body had been blind, but the eyes
of his soul shone with the light of faith, a light which eventually shone in his bodily eyes.
His faith stopped Jesus in his steps and caused
Jesus to call him to himself and to reassure him that he had a vision greater than those of his bodily eyes, the vision of
faith.
It is with such a vision that we too are gifted!
It is one which, if we are humbly open to it,
confers on us the energy, the strength and the will to make it effective in every aspect of life.
We have all visited a hall of mirrors and laughed (or cried!) at the
caricatures of ourselves those mirrors show us.
Faith is like such a mirror.
Only it reflects back to us the image of how God sees us.
Contrary to the way we might think, or the Devil
might want us to think, that image is not negative or ugly or filthy.
Rather, it is that image of us that God’s
love dreams of.
It is the image he desires and works for us to
become.
It is the image of our final redemption, of how
we will hopefully appear on the last day: glorious, perfectly serene, ineffably beautiful, bursting with divine light, joy
and, above all, divine love.
Would not anyone fall in love with such an image
and with the One who fashions it?
Would not anyone exert every fiber of his or her
being to attain to it as God’s sublime gift?
The image we see of ourselves every morning in
the mirror is what we might be inclined to consider as reality.
Yes, it is real. But it is only a passing reality!
Who are we to say that it is anything more than
that?
Who are we to be despondent of ourselves when
the Lord who created us is filled with love and hope for our ultimate reality?
God did not create us to rot in a grave.
Instead, he has destined our very flesh to participate
fully in the glory of his own immortal beauty.
Therefore, like Bartimaeus, let us not sit at the side of the road,
pitying our sorry lot.
Rather, let us call out upon Jesus in whose image
and likeness we know we have been created.
Let us run to him through all the obstacles and
circumstances of our lives.
Then, those eyes of ours which will indeed have
closed in death will be opened, never again to close, to see the bright vision of redeemed humanity in the loving arms of
the Risen Lord.
Msgr.
Peter Magee
Sunday,
October 29th, 2006
Annunciation,
DC: 7.00 am
