THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

 A SERMON FOR QUINQUAGESIMA SUNDAY

Among the feelings of anger, depression and frustration we’ve been experiencing these past few months, we must include also a certain sense of incredulous amazement.  As we watch the nation and the world seemingly going into self-destruct mode, we are forced to wonder how on earth the authors and perpetrators of this national suicide can possibly think that what they are doing is a good thing.  If you’re like me, you probably end up just shrugging your shoulders and dismissing them all as “bad people,” what Archbishop Vigano calls “children of darkness.”  While this may be true, to call Democrats and Progressives evil is a bit of an over-simplification.  Not because their lust for power and destruction in defiance of the spirit of the Constitution and the laws of God isn’t an evil thing in itself.  Rather because they appear so firmly oblivious to the evil of their agenda.

This is an odd thing.  Normally, when we go after something evil, it’s because there is some kind of perceived good to be achieved.  This perceived good is usually the satisfaction of some evil inclination, true, but at least there is that satisfaction, which to our corrupted human nature, provides us with some similarly corrupted sense of fulfillment.  But what good can be perceived by their hatred for a President whose policies resulted in benefits for all our fellow citizens, especially those whom they claim to hold in special esteem, the minorities, the poor and oppressed?  What good do they see in creating policies that jeopardize our safety by releasing hardened criminals from jail and letting in an unlimited number of unvetted illegal immigrants?  That create more poverty by enabling homelessness, by raising taxes and increasing regulations that put employers out of business?  That create an explosion of immorality by promoting every imaginable vice as the highest pinnacle of self-achievement?  Let’s not forget their unflinching promotion of abortion, particular in the minority communities they claim to protect.  Where do they see good in any of these things.  It’s national suicide where the only good they can claim to be going after is the destruction of their own nation and its identity.  They seem to take pleasure in slitting the wrists of the country and watching its lifeblood drain away into the dust.

There is a man in today’s Gospel who begs our blessed Lord, who is passing by, for mercy.  He is blind and desires to see.  So he cries out that Jesus, the Son of David, may have mercy on him.  For this he is rebuked, but not dissuaded from crying out all the more.  He perseveres in his cries for mercy, and our divine Lord rewards his persistence by restoring his sight.  Those enemies of God, children of darkness, or whatever you want to call them, are similarly blind.  The difference between them and the blind man of our Gospel is that they don’t seem to know it.  For if they did, then surely they too would want to see.  But as children of darkness, they know nothing but the darkness in which they live, a dark world in which they cannot see anything, because it is a world that has no light.  They see, as St. Paul describes, “through a glass, darkly.  This glass is the prism through which they see their darkened, evil view of the world.  They have only to ask God for mercy, and he would give them the grace to see otherwise.  But they do not ask.  And so God does not grant them to see.

How hardened are we to our own desires for self-indulgence that we do not ask God for the grace to change our ways?  What are the attachments in our own life that we’ve resigned ourselves to accepting?  What bad habits, vices, habitual mortal sins even, have we come to accept as inevitable?  What temptations persist in attacking us, for which we’ve stopped asking God for the graces to fight?  Before the start of this Lenten season of penance, we absolutely must examine our conscience in this matter.  For if we are to do penance, we must know what we are doing penance for.  It’s not enough to enter into Lent with some vague notion of “making reparation for sin” or “feeling sorry” for the bad stuff we’ve done.  We must approach Lent with the firm purpose of amendment.  We must seek to amend our lives and rid ourselves of any complacent attachment to the specific sins into which we keep on falling.  It’s no good to attribute them to our “personality”, to “the way we are.”  Our task this Lent is to improve that personality and become better than the way we are, to become the best we can be.  For this we need the grace of God.  So let’s not let Christ pass by this Lent without crying out to him with all the persistence of the blind man in today’s Gospel, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me!”  “Ask, and ye shall receive.  Seek, and ye shall find.  Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”  But if we’re so hardened to our sins, so familiar with them that they are no longer repulsive to us, then it’s time to wake up.  Time to turn on the light in our darkness, time to stop seeing through a glass, darkly.

Sooner or later, we will see God, not through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.  We will know him no longer in part, but even as also we are known by him.  For the enemies of God, that will be a terrible moment.  A light will switch on in their dark minds, illuminating for them the horror of all they’ve done to hurt God and destroy souls.  And in particular their own souls.  This light will provide them forever with a deep loathing of themselves, an infinite and eternal self-hatred of what they are which will burn into their souls forever.  May God protect us from such a fate.  Let’s do what we must to avoid it.

And on this Quinquagesima Sunday, when St. Paul speaks to us of “faith, hope and charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity,” then let’s start on our quest to put away our thoughts of anger, depression and frustration at all the things that are happening to us and our country.  Let’s replace them with thoughts of compassion for our enemies.  Let’s keep in mind their ultimate and horrendous fate if they fail to seek the light of truth, if they neglect till too late to beg God for the mercy he would surely show them.  It’s a terrible, awful fate, and one that we can so easily avoid by simply realizing our own blindness.  May God have mercy upon us all.