I’ll begin with blindness—namely, my own.
Last year around this time, I had my spiritual life in order. My relationship with God was more or less figured out. Every day began with a run in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, usually alone, but sometimes with friends from my local track club. God was always there: in the silence, in the morning light sparkling across the lake, in the wooded trails snaking along rock formations in the ravine. I found God on the subway, too, taking advantage of my commute to pray the psalms or read Dante or Thomas Merton. I went to Mass often enough—not every week, but regularly, such that I never felt out of step with the liturgy.
I never had the sense that God cared how many times I went to Mass. What mattered more was the substance of my faith, the sincerity of my interior life, within which was rooted the kindness I showed others, the passion and dedication I brought to my work, relationships, and hobbies.
Besides, I felt entitled to a dispensation. I’ve been Catholic since birth, attending Sunday school and house Masses with a group of lay Catholics my parents belonged to in suburban Philadelphia. I went to an Augustinian Catholic high school, which, though in some ways disedifying, also made me long for the spiritual peace Augustine felt after allowing his restless heart to rest in God. After a few wayward years in college, I came back to Church, hard. In graduate school I underwent a zealous conversion, inspired by Augustine, Dante, Francis of Assisi, and Merton himself, that left me with an overpowering desire to become a priest.
I followed through, twice. First, I entered a monastery in Italy. I experienced psychological abuse at the hands of my novice master for months before he made sexual advances on me. I had to flee. After a year and a half of psychotherapy, prayer, and reflection, I entered the Jesuit novitiate in Syracuse, New York, eager to dedicate my life to the greater glory of God. A few months later, I was forced to withdraw because I hadn’t adequately dealt with the trauma of the monastery. The very real love that surrounded me in the Jesuits only made the depth of my woundedness more apparent and more painful.
I left with a heavy heart, but in a short time I found a position at Commonweal and moved to New York. I was ready and willing to go wherever God called me, living first in a tiny room in a shared apartment, then in my own place near a forested park at the northern tip of Manhattan, where I liked to think of myself as a kind of urban hermit. During the pandemic, I slowly opened myself to relationships. After a few false starts, I fell in love and got married.
Things were great. After months of trying to have a baby, my wife and I learned last March that she was pregnant. We were thrilled, and her pregnancy, if not exactly a breeze, was mostly a wonderful time of expectation and preparation.
Then our son Arlo arrived, and in spite of his good health and our great joy, I struggled. First with sleep, then with hygiene, typical for all new parents. But more serious problems followed. My sleep deprivation, combined with the stress of providing Arlo with round-the-clock care—while setting up a new apartment and being away from work—provoked a fresh mental-health crisis. I stopped taking care of myself and tried to push through. Eventually it became too much, and I broke.
“Awake, sleeper, and Christ will give you light.” Paul’s right, but here in Ephesians he doesn’t say when Christ’s light will come. “Like a thief in the night,” he explains elsewhere, in a letter to the Christian community in Thessalonica. Paul’s point is that there’s an edge to the light—even a harshness, like the pain you feel in your ears when you’ve been roused from sleep by, say, a shrieking infant.
The lectionary for the Fourth Sunday of Lent offers two versions of John’s story of the man born blind. The abridged version might be more pious, but the longer one is more interesting. As I read it, it’s less a story about the blind man’s faith—who wouldn’t believe after receiving a miraculous healing?—than about the meanness and pusillanimity of the various reactions to the miracle Jesus performs.
Afraid of getting kicked out of their synagogue for admitting that Jesus did something good on the Sabbath, the man’s parents protest, “Ask him yourselves.” The arrogant Pharisees proclaim “We follow Moses,” as if they’re the only ones with access to God. Even Jesus’s disciples, who’ve seen him perform dozens of other miracles, don’t get it.
Am I any different? In the face of the miracle of my son’s life I’m too ready to complain about how hard it’s become to “find time for myself” or “pursue my interests.” I often catch myself thinking, even saying, “I didn’t sign up for this!” When of course it is exactly what I signed up for, and so obviously what God is asking of me.
That’s why God is God, and I am me. It’s like Merton once wrote: we Christians are all signed with “the seal of Jonas.” Whenever I scheme and scramble and try to get out of going to where God wants to send me—Jonas to Ninevah, me to the changing table, or to the pediatrician, or to the park with the stroller—God sends a whale that swallows me up and spits me out in the place I was either too reluctant or fearful or lazy to go myself.
I have never been inside the belly of a whale, but I can imagine it’s dark and unpleasant. A bit like the first few months of my son’s life were for me. Rabbi, who sinned, our son or his parents? Well, I can’t speak for Arlo’s mom, but I’m sure I have sinned, intentionally and repeatedly. My resolutions to “do better” don’t keep me from falling short.
That is why I need Jesus, his grace, his light, his peace. Not because I deserve it, or remember asking for it. It’s that I—we—simply have no life apart from that light. I’ve had a regular prayer life for almost two decades, so I haven’t exactly been blind to that fact. But slowly, subtly, I began ignoring it. Then I got too comfortable, too wrapped up in myself, and forgot it. Now my eyes sting, and I’m grateful for the tears.
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