Fr Peter Helman

 
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.
 
Love (III)
By George Herbert (1593–1633)
 
 
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 Dear beloved,

A question put to Jesus by his disciples as they walk together on the Sabbath frames the story from the Gospel of John that we read this morning. Passing a man, they ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
 
It’s not by any stretch an unusual question. I wager we’ve each asked, at least tongue and cheek, among close friends or silently to ourselves, “What happened to so and so to deserve this?” Or of those we count our enemies, “So and so got their just deserts!”
 
We might be tempted to ask as much in the face of the current pandemic. “What have we done to deserve this?” "Where is the love of God in this dark place?" I recall many pastors of a certain persuasion self-righteously declaring the horrors of Hurricane Katrina were the reward of America’s collective transgression.
 
The man’s blindness, however, is not a consequence of sin at all, Jesus says, but truly a fact of life in which “God’s works might be revealed in him.”
 
The encounter on the road between Jesus and the man whom tradition names Celidonius is most evocative for its invitation it lays before us to see the world, ourselves, and our neighbors rightly, to behold, as Herbert so beautifully writes, the loving determination of “quick-eyed Love” to enlighten our eyes and set us on our right pathway.
 
We read this morning not a parable of human suffering and divine retribution, but a story fundamentally about grace and love, for while discrimination names the man outcast, his life, like our very own, is received from God as pure gift. Every change and chance of this mortal life, wherever we find ourselves along the road, is the domain of Grace, an opening for the glory of God to be made known in our lives while the one who is the Light and Life is at work in the world.
 
Today, may Jesus touch our eyes, give us light to see with Celidonius the incomparable grace of God, and to declare with him: “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

Peace in Christ,
Fr. Peter