Healing from Spiritual Blindness
One of the most vital
healings that must take place in our journey of transformation is the healing
of spiritual blindness. The ancient Celtic hymn, "Be Thou My Vision"
is an invocation and prayer for that healing. We ask that Christ be our eyes,
Christ be our vision, that we come to see life and the world through the eyes
of Christ.
One way that we come to this
healing is that we *ask* for healed sight. In the story of Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46) we have an example of the
healing of a physical sight, but with intimations of the opening and awakening
to spiritual sight. This story has
been used as a source for the longer form of the Jesus Prayer in the Prayer of
the Heart tradition. ("Jesus, son of David, have mercy.") In the story Bartimaeus has an intuition
of “seeing” and of the One who can help him "see." ” In his
helplessness and Faith, he trusts the One who is greater than his own personal
powers. He receives his physical sight, but we may read into the story that he
has regained also his spiritual sight of the remembrance of God as the Source
of life and wholeness. The awakening to the unified inner vision of Faith is
the real healing and the occasion of the healing of his physical limit.
Another
way we come to the healing of our spiritual sight is through life crisis.
Crisis happens. In such a crisis our usual patterns are rendered helpless; we
are “knocked from our high horse.” In the Acts of the Apostles there is a
dramatic account of such an event in Paul’s awakening from blocked spiritual
vision. (Acts 9:1) Paul has become
a violent and brutal man, consumed and possessed by the demon of his arrogance
and grandiose self -righteousness. He is possessed with an obsession for
control to the degree he is willing to commit murder. His killing and persecution
of others stems from a self-absorbed conviction and grandiosity that he alone
possesses truth and no one may live, no one may be acceptable, who is not
inside the circle of his pride.
Paul is brought low; his physical vision is lost entirely. His spiritual
blindness is metaphorically revealed in physical blindness. But he cannot open
to spiritual vision until he experiences the crisis of his helplessness, and
the healing of it in surrender to Christ. He must look outside the pride of own
self-creation for help and resolution.
His encounter with Christ as a lightning bolt knocking him to the ground
becomes his salvation. Only then is he willing to look beyond himself and his
pride for help, and the scales eventually do fall from his eyes.
Paul’s pre-conversion
behavior may be a good example of what we are now seeing in our times as a
symptom of the death throes of tribal ethnic religion, with the rise of
militant fundamentalist and violent religious movements in nearly every
continent and religion in the world, including out own. This mythic membership, tribal level of
consciousness, as it is called by Ken Wilber in his books, (Anatomy of
Consciousness, The Atman Project) is marked by the preoccupation of the believer with
the question of who is in or out of "my particular circle," rather
than the awakening to the Circle that encompasses us all. It has been thought the violence of
9/11 was an attempt to incite global war between the Abrahamic Faiths, and to
some extent it has succeeded. In the long run we shall hope it will fail and
result in greater desire for communion and understanding. Yet all of us are
capable of Paul's exclusion, fear, and violence. Today all of us should hear
Christ calling to us, like Paul, “Why are you persecuting me?”
For us what is the awakening
of spiritual vision? What are the scales on our eyes? They are the filters of vision created by the self-made
self. To be healed we must move from
a self-absorbed narcissistic vision to a unitive Christocentric awareness of
Love. Our beliefs and schemes will not heal our vision. Only the experience of
the healing touch of Christ in our practice will heal our vision. John Main
speaks the Way of the Heart in the praxis of Christian meditation in this way:
“" Meditation is returning to your
own center, and finding that it is the gateway to the Center of all." (Main, The Heart of Creation, p.29) When we
find oneness in the Heart of Christ, our Center, we live in the awareness of
our oneness with all things. St. Gregory of Nazaianzus says it this way,
"Christ exists in all things that are." (Ryan, p. 31) The healing of
spiritual blindness is the awakening to Oneness in Christ. It is the means by
which the filters of vision of my self, my tribe, my gender, my opinions, my
church, my culture, my language, my country, and my world are dismantled. I can
then open to the Mystery of Christ who embraces all, and draws all unto
Himself. This is our true awakening from spiritual blindness. "The day of my spiritual awakening
was the day I saw - and knew I saw- all things in God and God in all
things." Mechtild of Madeburg (Ryan, p.31)
The mind is the source of
filters to our vision; the Heart is the seat of true spiritual “seeing” or
awareness. Only by learning to observe the mind and disengage from its tyranny
can we really let the heart expand and open to unitive love in Prayer of the
Heart. Hadewich of Antwerp (12c.) says of this release from the mind's filters:
“Tighten to nothing the circle that is the world’s things. Let the naked circle
expand to encompass All.”(Hirshfield, p.100) The
"naked circle" is the circle of Christ in the Heart. Our vision is
one of either smaller and smaller circles, or larger and larger ones, until our
vision is healed and opens to the Circle of the universal Heart of Christ which
encompasses All.
Even the insight of
Christians of the Mystery of Christ is always a limited one. Christ is not the
exclusive property of those who call themselves Christians or of the Christian
churches. Thank God for that! Christ, His Life, His love, His wisdom,
communion with Him is accessible to all, regardless of what name they call Him,
or under what concept His Reality is known. He is not an exclusion clause, but
the Heart of the Universe, the Heart of God.
It is good to recognize the
markers of our blindness, the fear, judgement, and rejection of the stranger.
Our xenophobia, putting what the mind doesn't grasp outside the circle of
Christ, that is our adversary with whom we struggle. We must recognize our grasping the comfortable and familiar
"isms" and ideologies. We must be vigilant in seeing the “log” in our
own eyes. Those "logs" are described aptly in the psychological
defense mechanisms of rationalization, repression, projection, and denial. We
can cultivate the dismantling and release of these ego filters in our practice
of Breathing Yeshua. In our practice of the kenosis of Christ we bow and offer
ceaselessly in our moments of helplessness, in our willingness to loosen the
grasping hand of control, to yield our insistence on the world being the way we
think it should be. In this
disposition we can find ourselves healed both in the intuitive trust of
Bartimaeus and in the yielding and helpless surrender of Paul. We can be healed to the Christ Vision
of Unitive Love. A spiritual elder, mystic, and teacher of our times, Thomas
Hand S.J. spoke this simple truth of the unitive vision of Christ in a
contemplative talk in 1997 at Shalom Prayer Center. "The God experience is
awakening to Oneness and fully accepting and living the consequences."
The world in which we live,
all Creation, is translucent, filled and shining with the Glory of Christ.
Because of blocked spiritual vision most of us don't see it. But we can be
surprised. We can be opened to this
glory unexpectedly. My lightning moment, being knocked off my high horse, or
perhaps more appropriately, cut off at the knees, was the occasion of the
sickness and death of my son. At the time of his cremation with my wife and my
spiritual mentor, Doug, I sat in silent meditation in the crematorium. Within
me was a great struggle as waves of anger, bitterness, and despair passed
through my mind. The challenge of emptying and releasing was great. At a
certain point when it seemed nothing was left, a peace arose in me of calm and
quiet. Looking at one another that it was time, we rose together and left the
room and walked outside into the light of a September day in late morning. The
morning mist was lifting. I looked around at the trees and the brown hills of
late summer. For just a moment the physical world suddenly disappeared and
there remained a pure Radiance shining through everything, a Life, a Presence
of Fire and Love. A wordless communication spoke from this Fire, "He is my
beloved child, he is forever one with me and one with you." The Radiant Life has never left me and
I have never left It. At that
moment the scales fell for me and the circle of the Light of Christ became my
vision.
The monk, Thomas Merton,
describes such a moment of the healing of his spiritual blindness. He had long
wrestled with his sense of isolation from the world, and his desire to find a
unitive vision to reconcile the life of the solitary hermit monastic with the
life of compassionate concern for the world.
"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in
the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the
realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I was
theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total
strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious
self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed
holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. … Then it
was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their
hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self knowledge can reach, the core of
their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only we could see
each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred,
no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we
would fall down and worship each other." (Merton, Confessions of a
Guilty Bystander )
