Lectio Divina — “blind”
Day 11 of the Season of Creation
Friday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
September 11 Anniversary
Lectio — blind
> “Can a blind person guide a blind person?”
— Luke 6:39
Jesus asks a question whose answer seems embarrassingly obvious. Of course the blind cannot safely lead the blind. Yet perhaps the reason he asks it is that spiritual blindness rarely announces itself as blindness. I can be most certain that I see clearly precisely when I have stopped examining what is obstructing my sight.
On this September 11 anniversary, the question becomes larger than myself. Individuals can be blind, but communities and nations can become blind as well. Fear, anger, grief, ideology and the desire for security can narrow vision until I see only the thing immediately in front of me.
Jesus therefore turns the question back upon me: Before I try to lead, correct, condemn or even understand another, what am I failing to see?
Meditatio — blind
One of the features of The Glenn is the Rose Garden. My dad established it. My mom cared for it after his death. Under my care, unfortunately, it has suffered. I am neither the Master Gardener my dad was nor as dedicated to it as my mom was.
And there in the middle stands an overgrown mulberry tree.
I do not even know whether Dad planted it or whether it volunteered. There is nothing inherently wrong with the tree. The problem is that it has grown so large that it can blind me to the garden around it.
There is a wonderfully ridiculous truth in that: I can fail to see the garden for the tree.
But what are my mulberry trees?
What has grown so large in my consciousness that I can no longer see what surrounds it? My immediate needs? Self-interest? Anger? Old grievances? Political loyalties? Fear? Technology? Even some legitimate concern can become so enormous that everything else disappears behind it.
September 11, 2001, inevitably raises this question for me. I remember the horror of that day and the fear and anger that followed. Twenty-five years later, amid today’s conflict involving the United States and Iran, I have to resist drawing a simple straight line from one event to another. History is more complicated than that. But the anniversary still gives me reason to examine how fear, trauma and the memory of violence can narrow the vision of persons and nations.
And then I must make the question personal: What wars am I still fighting because something that happened years ago has blinded me to what is actually before me today?
The Season of Creation brings another blindness into view. I can turn on a faucet at The Glenn and see living water appear. That very ease can blind me to the aquifer beneath me, to drought, to the needs of my neighbors, to future generations, and to the countless creatures whose lives also depend upon water.
The water is visible.
Its cost can remain invisible.
Perhaps conversion begins not by acquiring some extraordinary new vision but by pruning whatever has grown between me and what was there all along.
Oratio — blind
Lord Jesus,
You opened the eyes of the blind,
and today I ask you to open mine.
Show me the mulberry trees of my heart—
the fears, resentments, appetites and certainties
that have grown so large
that I mistake them for the whole garden.
On this anniversary of September 11,
receive those who died, comfort those who still grieve,
and deliver me from allowing remembered violence
to become permission for new hatred.
During this Season of Creation,
open my eyes to the gift of living water.
Do not let abundance make me blind to scarcity,
convenience blind me to consequence,
or ownership blind me to stewardship.
Before I presume to guide another,
let me first be guided by you.
Prune what needs pruning, Lord,
so that I may see the garden again.
Amen.
Contemplatio — blind
The mulberry tree also helps me understand the warning in Magnifica humanitas about artificial intelligence.
The danger is not merely that an algorithm might make a mistake. The deeper danger comes when I become blind to the fact that a judgment has been made at all.
An automated system can classify someone as suitable or unsuitable, trustworthy or risky, employable or unemployable, deserving or undeserving. Because the process arrives dressed in numbers, data and technical language, I can mistake calculation for impartial wisdom.
Then the algorithm becomes my guide.
And Jesus’ question becomes startlingly contemporary: “Can a blind person guide a blind person?”
Artificial intelligence can detect patterns that I cannot see, but it cannot see a human person as God sees one. It cannot possess compassion, exercise mercy, forgive an enemy or hope for someone’s conversion. Most importantly, it cannot accept moral responsibility for the human consequences of its judgment. If I surrender that responsibility to it, I have not eliminated judgment; I have merely made the judge harder to see.
That is a peculiar kind of blindness.
September 11 teaches me something similar about violence. When fear dominates the horizon, human beings can disappear behind categories: enemy, threat, foreigner, casualty. Once the label becomes larger than the person, compassion itself can disappear from view.
And the Season of Creation reveals the same temptation in my relationship with the earth. Water can become merely gallons. Soil can become acreage. A tree can become an obstruction. Creation can become resources.
Yet living water refuses such reduction. Water flows through boundaries. It connects my well to an aquifer, my sheep to the pasture, my household to my neighbors, today’s decisions to tomorrow’s children, and ultimately all creation to its Creator.
So perhaps I should not immediately cut down the mulberry tree.
First, I should stand beneath it and look carefully. Then I can prune what needs pruning so that both the tree and the Rose Garden may flourish.
And perhaps God desires to do something similar with me.
Lord, prune whatever has grown so large within me that I have become blind to the garden.
Day 11 of the Season of Creation on the 25th anniversary September 11, 2001
