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Reflection for Date November 5, 2006

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Our pastor's insightful homily last Sunday about the blind man of Jericho, who despite the objections of the crowd cried out to Jesus for mercy, brought back to me the memory of a long ago evening in Rome. I was a new theology student selected to serve as an acolyte at a ceremony in the 500 year old Jesuit church called the Gesu. It was a baroque edifice with a high dome covered with frescos of angels and saints spiraling upward into a brilliant sky - so that you wondered whether you were looking into a dome at all or into a vision of heaven itself.

Presiding over the ceremony was Cardinal Tisserant, a member of the Vatican Curia. The sanctuary was full of clerics of which I was a merely decorative one. But I was situated so close to the Master of Ceremonies that he handed me the Cardinal's mitre to hold (that tall hat with peaks front and back that bishops wear). I was terrified for I knew that sooner or later I would be told to do something with it. And sure enough there came that moment when the Master of Ceremonies signaled me to come forward and place it on the kneeling Cardinal's head. Hesitantly I approached the Cardinal from behind. The Master of Ceremonies gave me a stern look and hissed, "Put it on!" So I raised it high and brought it down in such an awkward way that it tilted forward well over the Cardinal's eyebrows and the bridge of his nose. Startled, he bolted upright, adjusted it, then looked at me as if to say, "Chi e questo stupido?" Well, questo stupido was I and under the glare of all the clergy around me I wished I could disappear.

Now I didn't need that kind of humiliation, for life had already made me humble enough. I mean, from shortly after my infancy I had experienced enough frowning, correction and slaps across my bottom to make me doubt my worth. Having a father and mother who were preoccupied with hard times, I could hardly expect much affirmation from that quarter. Then there were teachers with short tempers who couldn't resist dispensing their bile in my direction by way of caustic comments and the letter D on my homework. There was also peer pressure. Walking into a schoolyard in the 1930's, especially if you were a new kid, was asking for trouble.

But our parish church had a stained glass window showing Jesus welcoming little children and I thought: maybe if I got close to him, I might find some genuine affirmation. So I entered a seminary but even there much of the spirituality was Jansenist enough to make one feel unworthy of proximity to God. In our novitiate, for example, humility was induced by making one kneel in the chapel aisle if one fell asleep during meditation, One novice I know underwent that sanction only to fall asleep even while kneeling and fall flat on his face. What I mean is: there is so much in life (whatever one's vocation) that would leave one blind to one's own worth.

Fortunately, though, I did get past the frowns and hisses and close enough to Christ to experience (by way of graduate studies in Sacred Scripture) his absolute affirmation in remarks like "You are the salt of the earth" and Paul's "If God is for me, who can be against me!" Like the man by the Jericho road I had indeed become blind to my God-given worth but I sensed deep down that Jesus might relieve my ailment, no matter how much a judgmental world might chase me away. And he responded, immersed my negative perception of myself in his grace, so that like the fellow in the Gospel, I have ever wanted to stay close to him wherever he might lead. He can do the same for you, if you can get past those "overseers" (both internal and external) who would convince you to doubt your worth and thereby remain stuck, begging for attention, begging for a handout along the Jericho road.

-- Geoff Wood