Certainly one of the most interesting Catholics of the past hundred years has got to be Saint Mother Theresa of Calcutta. After she died her diaries were published and revealed something quite remarkable…even shocking…but I think really comforting too. Her diary entries expressed that during the last sixty years of her life she struggled with God...She and God were not connecting. On more occasions than not she had no real feeling of God’s presence…she was in the desert feeling spiritually alone. And yet…of all the 20^th century Catholic icons she has possibly had the greatest spiritual influence on our world. The fact is…her entire life radiated a profound sense of selflessness…a marked gracefulness…an un-matched zeal for bringing about Christ’s Kingdom in our world. Her story is so ironic…by her own admission…she lived a life lonely for God and at the same time in communion with God.

Our gospel today…the blind man healed by Jesus…he’s a metaphor for Mother Teresa…he’s a metaphor for you and me. I don’t know about you…but this the case for me…we’re almost always spiritually blind…unaware of God…in need of His presence in our lives and at the very same time we are almost always…certainly every week at Mass and every day if you are a daily mass attendee…we’re almost daily given a crystal clear vision by Christ himself in the Eucharist. In fact…this is the very reason why the priest holds up the Eucharist at mass…so that you might see Jesus. The blind man…Mother Teresa…you and me…we live lives of total desolation apart from God and total revelation of the presence of God himself…all at the same time.

I bring this up because of a recent conversation I had with someone this week about his frustration and even guilt over the fact that no matter how hard he tries…no matter how many masses he attends…no matter how many prayers he prays…he just doesn’t feel the presence of God and she’s beginning to lose hope. He’s been racking her brain trying to figure out what he’s doing wrong…why God seems distant from him…why he’s so blind. And here’s what I told him...and I tell it to all of you now because I suspect there are many here at this mass who have the same frustrations in the spiritual life.

God is like an impressionism painting…Monet’s Water Lilies for example…the closer you are to the impressionism painting the less you understand of the image. Impressionism is painted with broad brushstrokes of thick oil paint that melds together to make up an image and the closer you are to it the less you can make out. Get right up next to Monet’s Water Lilies and it simply becomes a wash of color and texture with no rhyme or reason. But if you back away five…ten…twenty feet from the painting Water Lilies comes into focus. It’s the same with God. Sometimes the closer we are to God the less we actually see him…the less we feel his presence…the less we hear him speak…which is a beautiful irony. This was certainly the case for the blind man…he was right next to Jesus but all he knew was his blindness and his perceived sinfulness. And then in just a few moments of mud smudged on his eyes…it was as if all became clear to him…he could finally see God. This was the case for Mother Teresa for sure. Feeling totally blind to God…deaf to his words…unaware of his presence and yet completely immersed in His presence in the presence of the poor she and her sisters served. It’s the same for you and me…and this man I spoke with this week. In fact I’ve heard it said that our feelings of God’s absence…dryness in our prayer…even our spiritual blindness are precisely the reasons we are able to come into contact with God because these are the times when we’ve become selfless enough and ready for encounter. With all our senses void of God’s presence…with all thoughts of God blank…with our souls unable to imagine God…only then are we ready for God to reveal himself to us on His terms and not ours.

I told this fellow…God is sometimes so close to us…so intimate with us…so overwhelmingly present that it overwhelms even our awareness. The great medieval theologian Meister Eckhart said that silence is the language of God. You’ve heard me say time and time again that encountering God is about encountering the Word beneath the words. It’s like the burning bush story again and again and again. Moses encounters God in the burning bush. He asks…who should I tell them sent me. God says…tell them I AM sent you. What God means here is that he is not the greatest being…the tallest being…the oldest being…the smartest being. I AM means that God IS being itself. So it seems to me that the most profound encounter we could ever have with God would be without words…without empirical evidence of his presence…without the use of our five senses. God just is. And the closer you are to him…the more imperceptible he becomes. I love St. Thomas More’s comment…I love God but he is rather subtle isn’t he?

For this man I visited with this week…thinking he was a complete failure in not being aware of God…for the blind man in our gospel today…thinking he was a total sinner for being born blind to God…for Mother Teresa living her incredibly saintly life totally devoid of spiritual consolation…for you and me…when we can’t feel God’s presence…when he doesn’t seem to be speaking to us…when he doesn’t seem to know what we are going through…when we can’t see Him…it might very well be that He’s quite close to us and we don’t even realize it.

What I’m sharing with you is the spirituality of contemplation…seeing with the eyes of the soul…which is really what this gospel is about…the blind man was healed and he could see his healer Jesus…but even more profoundly he could finally see God with the eyes of his soul.

It was quite interesting…this guy I was visiting with this past week…when the conversation began he was really distraught…almost crying in frustration…ready to give up totally…as all of us have experienced throughout our lives truth be told. But at the end of our conversation…after I shared with him this beautiful Good News of God’s intimate presence in our lives…he couldn’t help it…he began smiling…even started laughing out of sheer joy because he got it…he could finally see…not with his eyes per say…he could finally see God with the eyes of her soul…and I think at that moment this good man wasn’t far from the Kingdom of God.