SUFFERING SPIRITUAL BLINDNESS

When a person with sight meets a blind person, a lot of questions run in the former’s mind: How does a blind man meet his wife? On a blind date. Why can’t blind people eat fish? Because it is seafood. How can blind people make eye contact? By touching the eyes. Being blind is very difficult as the sense of sight is indispensable in one's everyday routine. Unlike the loss of other senses and abilities (such as hearing, speaking, even walking), the loss of sight disables one incomparably; immobilizing a person to do his daily chores regularly, and to go to places he wants to go ordinarily. No one wishes to be blind, but sadly there are 250 million visually impaired people in the world today. Millions of these blind persons, if not all, surely seek remedy for their infirmity. Accordingly, even in the time of Jesus, blind persons wanted to be healed (Lk 18:35-43).

There is a more dangerous kind of blindness more than the loss of sight. This is spiritual blindness; the failure to see Jesus in one's life. This can be involuntary as in the case of those who never heard of Jesus yet. Worse type is the voluntary spiritual blindness; the deliberate turning of one's self away from Jesus. Without Jesus in one's life, the Light is lost too, the Light that gives birth to us to a new life, the Light that enables us to understand and see what one should do and where one should go. Jesus after all is the Light of the world. Whoever follows Him will have the light of life (Jn 8:12).

This voluntary spiritual blindness is the one that King Antiochus Epiphanes and some Israelites suffered (1 MC 1:10-15, 41-43, 54-57, 62-63). When they turned away from God and went to their pagan idols, they became blind. They lost the Light. Away from the Lord, they were able to do abominable deeds such as sacrilege and defilement of the temple. They were deceitfully led to believe in false gods. But those whose sight remained firmly planted on their vision of God and His commandments persisted in obeying Him even if it meant death for them. Voluntary spiritual blindness is the most dangerous type of blindness for it leads one to his eternal damnation away from the beatific vision for all eternity.

And so we look at Jesus. Even with great difficulties, we look for ways to find Jesus in our life (just like the blind man in the gospel who saw beyond his physical challenges and those people who prevented him from approaching Jesus). And we will be surprised, Jesus will be the One eagerly approaching us, allowing us to see by ourselves the deepest desire of our hearts, that is, to see Jesus. When that moment comes in our life, when the Light dawns upon our eyes, we can truly claim: I can see!