Lent 4 Year A

May I speak in the name of God, +creating, redeeming, sanctifying.
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(I begin by offering some further context from the first chapter of John’s gospel – ‘The light shone in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it…’) x

We all see the world through filters. Often without realising it, we ask questions like: What do I already believe? Does this new idea confirm what I already think? Does it fit within the frame I have already constructed?
You might know that old saying that people only change their minds when the pain of not changing becomes greater than the pain of changing. Anaïs Nin, with her profound understanding of the human heart, says it this way:
“And the day comes when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to Blossom”

We cannot see what we cannot see. Our biases can surround us like a wall, keeping us within patterns of misunderstanding, illusion, or partial truth. 

Back in 1955, psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham designed the psychological tool called the Johari Window used to enhance self-awareness and improve interpersonal relationships. If you can imagine a square divided into 4 quadrants…
Open Area: Known to self and others.
Blind Area: Known to others but not to self.
Hidden Area: Known to self but not to others.
Unknown Area: Unknown to both self and others.

And you’ll know from your own life’s experience – people just can’t see the truth. Where’s common sense gone these days?

But here we are all seeing life through our largely unconscious lens shaped by culture, family, and life experience. 

So I’m not sure anymore that my common sense is your common sense, but what I do think that what most of us share in common is in a quote often attributed to the writer Anaïs Nin, again – we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are. Post modernity crashed through the myth that we could ever see anything objectively, and yet still humans insist that “we know”, which I’m sure never fails to get giggle out of God.

But I’m not so sure that even the Laughing Buddha or a benevolent “there they go again” parent God smiles so much when humans who perhaps can’t see the whole picture, but think they should and can, find themselves with the power to drive really big and complex machinery, like the country or the world.

Let’s move on, move out, and move off the planet the ones who are the problem. One solution – get rid of the problem.

Tash and I have just finished watching Lord of the Flies – an adaptation of Golding’s work by Alan Thorne, the director of Adolescence. And much like I loved with Adolescence (highly recommended viewing!), Thorne never seems to blame the characters but offers a deeper, systemic, sociocultural critique and psychological lens into the symbiotic relationship of people, power and culture. Thorne takes the viewer on a journey, he enters us into the boys’ relationships with their fathers, absent or present, he shows how power is executed in groups, and its play in one-on-one encounters, all through the lens of tribal war games, exposing the mechanisms of the scapegoat, the outsider other and the insider.

As the viewer with my omnipotent God lens of Golding’s story through Thorne’s eyes, there wasn’t much laughter at the end. I wept.

It’s a bit like what John the storyteller does with this Gospel. The characters in the story world reflect positionalities, attitudes which all encounter the listener, that’s us, the other characters, and the protagonist, Jesus.

The gospel invites us into deeper and deeper levels of insight. Unless our cracks let the light in enough to reach the hidden places to find where our fundamental ‘this is how life is’ lives, very little truly changes. 

We may rearrange the furniture of our lives, but the structure of the house remains the same. As is heard in 12 step meetings, it’s like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Within each of us live three fundamental images that shape how we understand everything else: our image of ourselves, our image of God, and our image of the world. These images are formed within us over time.
The work of spiritual awakening is the largely out-of-our-control process of caterpillar, to cocoon, to goo, to slow enclosed forming, to strength enough to break free into flight. 

Over and over again. 

This is a painful time in our lives, and creation is groaning. It’s our own unique work to understand for ourselves Jesus words for us in today’s gospel: “As long as it is day, we must do the works of the one who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

My Lenten reflection this week is styled after an Ignatian prayer of contemplation and imagination: 

I will sit at Christ’s feet, face upturned, with all my ignorance, hubris and bias, watch him spit mingling saliva with mud, and let him anoint my eyes with chrism, his living water and the clay earth where I was first formed….

Amen.