Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B; St. Ann's.
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 take a little break from the Advent focus on waiting and
celebrate. Lucy’s name is derived from the Latin word for light, so in parts of
France it’s a day to let off fireworks. In parts of Scandinavia, it’s an
occasion for parades in which young women wear headdresses containing lit
candles. As the winter darkness draws in, 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 or
spooky about that, but it’s a thoroughly Christian kind of spooky: 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. That fullness of joy is what we often call the beatific
vision – the happy or blessed vision of God – but St. Lucy reminds us that this
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. I know He’s not finished with
us yet, and death isn’t some artificial limit after which God can’t heal us,
can’t reform us, can’t make us more holy, more loving. There’s no “can’t” with
God. And there’s no room for sin in heaven, but there’s room for us. That’s not
an excuse though to do nothing now to grow in holiness. God doesn’t give people
gifts they don’t want. If we act like we don’t want to detach ourselves from
sin, never trying to grow in love, never seeking forgiveness when we mess up
(including in the sacrament of reconciliation when needed), God isn’t going to
force that on us. Purgatory frees us to seek to grow in holiness and detachment
from sin without fear that we need to be perfect by the time we die.
No bodily impairment will keep anyone from joy in heaven, but they
often do on earth. There’s a difference 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 smaller
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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