During my travels in Spain, I was speaking to a woman in what I thought was acceptable Spanish. The woman just flat out told me, “I do not understand you!” I felt very deflated. I had another experience there though. I went to confession in Spain and the priest spoke Spanish and I speak very little Spanish, especially not technical words for sins. Yet he heard my confession and then spoke to me in Spanish and I understood, for the most part, the advice and the penance he gave me, which were both in Spanish. I profited much from what the priest said to me. I wanted to listen. I was so overcome with love for this priest because I heard God speak through him.
How does this relate to the Gospel of the day? Today we have the story of a man who was born blind and who is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, healed. There are witnesses and also his parents. But the Pharisees don’t want to believe. They are angry at Jesus and don’t want to listen to the obvious data that is there. I hear this happens at times in parishes when a foreign priest with an accent comes. Some people refuse to understand him, perhaps because they don’t want to. But the many who make the effort to listen, find they profit from his teaching.
We can easily have this attitude before God. God is not telling me what I want to hear so I am not going to listen. Even if He does signs and wonders, I will not be there to hear. I was thinking how in my own life, I have expected God to bless me in certain ways and because it didn’t happen I was so disappointed. When discussing the matter with God, He showed me that He is not bound by my plans. For example, if you expect a certain person to praise you or love you or be kind to you and they are not, you could become very sad and question why isn’t God doing what I ask Him to. And you, like me, will be like the Pharisees of today’s Gospel. However, if we really look we will see that God has many ways of blessing us, many ways of answering our prayers, if we just open our eyes and pray that they will be open. As in the case of the foreign priest, can God not speak directly to you in the Sacraments, in the Holy Word of God?
God has the power to bless us in many, many ways if we simply are willing to see, to listen, if we are wait for God to act, and if we take the time to stop telling Him how He must act. Look at something amazing – in the Eucharist it is God coming down and coming inside of us. Yesterday I was in a big hurry to leave the Church after Mass, most likely a temptation from the devil because God was in me. I then noticed that He was still stuck to my tooth so instead of hurrying out, I had the grace to wait. It was not what I wanted to do, I had things to get done, but I waited and let Him work inside of me. It was a glorious time, in all truth, once I went according to God’s schedule instead of mine. I felt a deeper inner peace after that. This week on my visits to the hospital, a fellow stopped me from a different faith. I was not super inclined to talk to him because I had visiting to do and I was on a schedule. But I did and he told me many great and inspiring things about how God had manifested Himself in this his life and his difficult marriage. I was almost in tears listening to the glory of God in this man’s life and because of the man’s humility to ask me, from another faith background, to visit one of his loved ones.
I see on a daily basis that God desires to rain down blessings in our lives. However, it seems to me that God is also raining them down in ways that are not what we have determined. God is trying to do to us what He was doing with the Pharisees in the Gospel and that was drawing them into a bigger world. The big world of God.
What are the road blocks we are putting in our lives right now that, like the Pharisees, make us blind to God’s blessing? What ways are we telling God He must bless us?
Let us say instead, “God, open my eyes to the way you want me to bless me.”