The gospel miracles are also parables, teaching aids employed by Jesus. The images of darkness and light, blindness and vision, are very prevalent throughout the Scriptures, in both the Old and New Testaments. There are different ways of seeing things; we can view an individual superficially, by appearances. But this is not the vision of God, as we learn from the appointment of David in our Old Testament extract from the Book of Samuel today: "God does not see as man sees; man looks at appearances, but God looks into the heart."

The same image is taken up by Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians: "You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord. The effects of light can be seen in complete goodness, right living and truth. We see relationships flounder daily because of an inability to come clean with the truth in love, as Paul put it in another place. Concealment breeds suspicion and erodes trust between a couple. "Anything exposed to the light will be illuminated and anything illuminated turns into light."

The same theme is taken up in the Gospel extract: "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." The blind man of today's gospel, like blind people everywhere, inhabits a world of darkness. His disability cuts him off from the rest of humanity. He is totally dependant on the guidance of other people. That blind man is symbolic of humanity. This language has a common currency. We use it in our everyday speech. We often refer to a person as "having a blind spot", or of going down blind alleys; He or she fails to see the entire picture, and, as a result, acts or behaves in a morally deficient manner. Our blindness can take on many forms. Left to our own devices, we are morally blind. If we have no moral or ethical reference point outside our own needs and greeds, blind selfishness takes over; we line our own pockets at the expense of our fellow man. This sort of blindness gives rise to widespread injustice.

Another familiar malady arising from moral blindness is fanaticism. So convinced is a person or a group of the rightness of their own cause that they are oblivious to the rights and indeed in many cases of the humanity of their supposed adversaries.
Yeats' famous poem, The Second Coming, captures the fanatic heart with great power:

Turning and turning in a widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
the blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.

We see today the blood dimmed tide loosed in the many troubled sport around the world, in the Congo, or in Algeria, or in Zimbabwe, or, most infamously of all, in New York on September 11 last year. The blindness of the fanatic is the most dangerous blindness of all. Indeed we don't have to go to Algeria for examples of such blindness. We have more than our share of home-produced examples. Instead of rational, informed debate we witness closed minds spinning around in circles. The end product of such blindness is, as we know to our cost, death and suffering.

People are deprived of what is rightfully theirs because our blindness has placed ourselves at the centre of the universe. If we are selfish or blinded by our own cares and desires, it will be impossible to see other people as our brothers and sisters. My own comfort and welfare becomes my only guideline.

Each epoch has its own blindness. In the 40s and 50s, Ireland was inward looking, blind to the concerns and struggles of Europe and the wider world. Television has enlightened us today, but has it given us wisdom? We do not have to struggle for our knowledge. It is thrown into our laps. But knowledge without wisdom is blind. The deep wells of our spirit remain untouched. All is superficial, shallowness is all. I am reminded of a novel written by a man called Brian Power in the middle 70s. It was a beautiful novel which did not get the recognition it deserved. Power was a curate in Inchicore, trying to come to terms with the loss of faith, hope and spirit in the inner city. He set his novel in Meath St. Presbytery, a place in which I had been working at the time. The novel is the story of a wasteland inhabited by hollow men and women. The growing generation of children are bored and empty, starved of an inner life and consequently very destructive. A young fellow fires a stone through the parish priest's window one Saturday night while he is preparing his Sunday homily. He rushed out, caught the offender, a thirteen year old child. He sat him down, gave him Cola and biscuits and tried to probe the reasons for his destructiveness. The young fellow spilled out the emptiness of his life and the blindness of his vision: The parish priest sums up the situation in a sort of soliloquy, addressed in an accusing way to himself rather than to the young fellow: "You are burdened son, with an unfurnished mind, your soul is a land unsown."

The story is pertinent today. However, as Jesus pointed out in today's gospel, faith leads to sight, to clear vision. Each of us will have different ways in which our eyes need opening. It could be that we need to see ourselves in a more truthful way. We may need to recognise our sins in a clearer light. But for a very many people their deepest need is the exact opposite: they need to see themselves more truthfully as children of God, loved by him and pleasing in his sight. Many of us are blind to our goodness, to what God's grace has already achieved in us. We should recognise these graces and, like the man in the first reading, give glory to God daily for them. We can also be blind to the lies that surround us, the false values that are so often paraded as desirable goals.

The gospel then is the torch that God has handed to humanity. Only with the help of its searching beam can we view humanity, our world and our selves in a proper perspective. The experience of this century alone has taught us that when that torch is dropped, civilisation comes crashing down.

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