There’s really
no good transition from plucking eyes out to anything else, so I’m not even
going to try. I’m just going to start talking about St. Lucy’s day, and that’ll
get us back to eyes soon enough. I don’t know if any of you have ever been to a
St. Lucy’s day celebration. It’s December 13th, and a traditional
day in many parts of Europe to lessen the rigors of Advent and celebrate. It’s
a Friday this year, so for people who want to have parties prior to the start
of the Christmas season, I especially recommend it. Lucy’s name is derived from
the Latin word for light, so in parts of France it’s a day to let off
fireworks. I parts of Scandinavia, it’s an occasion for parades in which young
women wear headdresses containing lit candles. As the winter darkness draws in
(which it does much more severely further North than here), these things can be
wonderful reminders of how the light Christ is scatters all that’s dark. But,
there’s an aspect of St. Lucy I haven’t discussed. She was an early martyr,
under Decian, and legend has it that as part of the torture they subjected her
to prior to her execution, her eyes were gouged out. Iconography of her often
features her holding those eyes on a platter. There’s something somewhat macabre
about that, but it’s a thoroughly Christian kind of macabre: As much
as Roman Imperial Power tried to degrade her, she lives in Christ; as much as
they tried to snuff out the light of her eyes, she inspires festivals of light
among so many people; her risen life as a saint with Christ, welcomed by him
into the kingdom, is full of light and joy, so full that she doesn’t need her
eyes back in her sockets to know heavenly joy.
In this gospel,
Jesus affirms that heaven has room for the maimed, for the crippled, for the
impaired. The kingdom of heaven has room for them, and not room at the back,
not grudging room: room for them to know the full joy of eternal life, the full
joy of life shoulder to shoulder with the saints in the halls of heaven. The
full of joy of what we often call the beatific vision – the happy or blessed
vision of God – but that St. Lucy reminds us is not the kind of vision that one
needs eyes to see. In heaven, bodily impairments don’t restrict anyone from
joy.
There is one
thing Jesus makes clear there is no room for in heaven, and that’s sin. Not
sinners: for healed, redeemed sinners, there’s room a-plenty. But, sin: no.
That’s why, incidentally, I find our Catholic teaching on purgatory so
life-giving. God has more healing for us, spiritual, moral healing, after
death. I can at the same time affirm that heaven wouldn’t be all that heavenly
if it was full of people like me, and that God is acting to get me there, and
wants me there, wants us all there. But, He’s not finished with us yet, and yes
He’s acting here and now to try and make us holier here on earth, and we should
(and do in our heart of hearts) want the sanctification now, but death doesn’t
put an artificial limit on God’s healing. Which is good, because we do all have
attachments to various sins and while we hope not to we may well die with those.
And there’s no room for sin in heaven, but there’s room for us.
No bodily
impairment will keep anyone from joy in heaven, but they often do on earth. In
disability studies, it’s common to differentiate between an impairment and a disability.
An impairment is anything that a person’s body can’t do; a disability is how
society is set up to keep that person out or on the edges because of that
impairment. None of us can rotate our heads 360 degrees like an owl: an
impairment we all share, but not a disability. I, and certain others here, have
the impairment of having very little pigment: my skin burns easily in the sun,
and my eyes have so little pigment that I find it hard to see on a sunny day. Those
are impairments, but they’re the opposite of disabilities: society affords
great privilege to those of us who are lacking in pigment. But so many other
impairments do keep people locked out of so much.
As a society,
we have made certain improvements in the last generation or so. That most every
sidewalk now slopes down at intersections makes travel easier for those who use
wheelchairs. That public buildings have to have accessible bathrooms means that
those who are shut out of “regular” stalls don’t have to worry about keeping
trips short enough to not have to go. But, there’s so much more. The
willingness to listen to another’s experience of being shut out, the
imagination to work with them to find solutions, the courage to act on insights
gained: all of these things are hard, and require growth in virtue. But the
refusal to even try is sin. It’s what Augustine called being curvatus in se curled
up on ourselves, refusing to open up to another’s experience.
Jesus invites
us to the kingdom of heaven, and he’ll keep working with us to get there. But
he also offers us a foretaste of that now. We can’t build the kingdom of God,
that’s God’s job. He’s pretty good at it. But if we want to be in it, we can
start to try to live it, to respond to the movements of grace in our world, and
to welcome others in too.
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