John 9.1-7
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. “When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.
As a child, I believed for a long time that if I cursed, I would be struck down by lightning. It didn’t matter that none of the people on TV nor my father when he was fixing something around the house, were themselves ever struck down when they cursed. I believed still that I would be. Even if I just whispered them. And on the other hand, when I “grew up,” after I had finished graduate school, six years of New York City living in which I lived on friendly terms with roaches and searched my couch cushions for coins to do laundry, while on my first vacation with my now husband, my first job as a newly minted psychologist secured, I had my first panic attack, right as we walked into the hotel. Looking past an open-air bar of our hotel, to a sparkling ocean view, I told him, the sound of my heart in my ears and my vision blurring, “I don’t deserve this. I can’t possibly deserve this.”
Thus, my dark times. Interestingly, they came at those times when my life stretched into what I most wanted: first, shortly after I was married, and then again, shortly after the birth of my children. Times I felt so lucky, so acutely aware of my own fortune, that I could only feel afraid. In the earliest days with my first son, watching his face while I nursed him in the middle of one those nights, I remember knowing that the love I felt was devastating. I became consumed with the possibility of loss and of failure, living in an assumed dichotomy of darkness and light, where I was just waiting anxiously to be plunged into the darkness, for all of the ways I couldn’t let myself feel like I deserved to stay in the light.
And yet. Darkness is not punishment any more than light is reward. The man is not blind because of sin. Moreover, Jesus says in this passage that it is not light that makes us see; in fact, it is the man’s blindness – it is the darkness that makes him see. Darkness, in fact, like so many of us felt in so many ways this past year – is not a punishment, nor a justified response to our sins. It is, in fact, a gift; as allowed by Jesus, darkness allows for light, and is a foundation of far greater understanding.
Partly though my work as a therapist and mostly through better intuiting God’s message, I have finally come to understand that light and darkness are not dichotomies, but part of a dialectic, that they are one and the same and not to be feared, but to be embraced as a whole, two sides of the same coin. Loss implies having had something worth grieving, affliction implies having had something previously unbroken, and most importantly, perhaps, empathy and compassion imply the duty to act on part of humanity.
At the start of the pandemic, an uncle of mine lent my husband and children and I his beach house down on the Jersey shore. In the confusion and fear that marked those days, I sought solace and some sense of certainty each morning in the sunrise. I would try to run before the kids woke up and before our working hours started. And just at the end of my run back then in March, the sun would be rising behind the sea wall that lined the beach town. I would climb a set of public stairs along the seawall just as the sky started to illuminate and behold the sunrise as a kind of prayer. I wanted then to take in a message; I wanted to be told or taught or reassured of something. The sky, of course, would transform over the ocean, color extending out from the horizon, red and then brighter oranges and gold, sending glitter across the water. Light. Light assuming the earth. Every morning, with certainty. In a world and in a life where certainty is otherwise an illusion –there was this. After looking at the sunrise, I would climb the stairs down to the sidewalk to run back home; once, there was a line of three people waiting at the bottom to do the same thing; masked, they stepped aside to let me pass.
Home with my children, divorced suddenly of a frenetic and rigidly packed schedule, I was able to eat dinner with my children every night for the first time. And we had more time together – time to play charades and hide ‘n seek, walk on the beach and found sand dollars. I could feel fear of the virus quickly shedding through layers of my life as I lived it, bringing me closer to the heart of the matter.
My therapy clients, as they all showed up for me now on my computer screen, were not so lucky. In those early days at a makeshift desk, my laptop sitting on top of a puzzle box, my mind had to stretch to take in what started coming at me from the screen: jobs lost; weddings cancelled; routines shattered and emotions haywire; the effects of isolation taking hold. Clients with the virus, too sick to have sessions. Clients with the virus, panicked and alone. Clients losing loved ones, their mourning overwhelmed by all else. And clients still, of course, suffering the same pains they maybe would have, had so much of the world outside of their emotions not been shuttered, pains that were now contextualized in lives where so much else was stripped away. Divorce still happened, cancer still got diagnosed, pregnancies were lost, and abuse continued to be delivered; no tragedy nor trauma outside of the pandemic stepped aside nor paused to make way for it. Life continued to herald on, replete with rejection and heartache and stress. But now, in darkness – in a violent torrent of uncertainty.
Just after George Floyd was killed, a client being treated within my practice died by suicide. At that point, anyone paying attention could feel a cry from what the heart of humanity should be, the virus having cast a reflection on the pains suffered by so much of our human community, a reflection that seared, as when a mirror is held to the sun. The images I saw on the news, of guttural protests, fists in the air, cries too strong to be muffled by masks - I could sometimes hear in the background of my sessions, police lights flashing through clients’ windows.
I soon recognized that all of the clients who were suffering, and so much of our shared humanity who have suffered, seemed to be suffer with a different form of the same ailment: an almost raw kind of fundamental pain - not always an actual lack of felt love and support, but as raw as that sometimes; more often, it felt like a combination of reality and perception verging on the absence, an abyss, without reliable interpersonal connection and human concern to depend upon, or when the pain was a problem of learned expectations, where care was perhaps not expected, uncomfortable to receive, easy to minimize and not see nor feel, where care was not believed to be deserved, or sought in the wrong places, or repeatedly denied. The problem that kept emerging was what it feels like to be left to wonder, if by reality or by distorted ways of thinking, and most often by both -- if and how much anyone cares, if and how much behind the broken pieces, one is loved. And that kind of doubt seems to me, to be a darkness that frightens people most of all.
Jesus said that we must work the works while it is day. And with that, he heals the blind man. It is not only that darkness gives us understanding – it is also that we have to use that understanding in the light of day. We have work to do, a lot of work to do, for the sake of humanity and not of ourselves – especially in the light, when we might otherwise choose instead our own comfort, safety, conveniences or principles. The pandemic has taught us that we can no longer let one another get sick, go lonely, be ignored, marginalized or exploited.
I learned from my clients and from large shares of the world whose hearts were even more broken, that where none deserved the darkness and where all could be cast in light, the light is us. Our doing. Our capacity to save one another. We can check in with each other. We can donate. We can teach. We can write. We can protest. We can vote. And if we can’t physically embrace one another, we can understand that six feet of distance as having the same intention. Our work has revealed itself so much more honestly and clearly: it is to make choices based on love for other human beings, and the desire and responsibility to care, however we each know how to, and with whatever we each have to negotiate. More than a reckoning, this year has been a slow and at times, painful, dawning. But a dawning that feels beautiful and emerging with light like some of us have never seen, in which we can feel Jesus moving through humanity, begging us to see, and to see that through humanity we have the power to heal.
