Friday of Week 23 in Ordinary Time
Saint Peter Claver
Because of some of the reading I am
doing for a class, this text from Luke pushes me to hone my understanding of
Church.
Can a blind person guide a blind person?
Will they not both fall into a pit?
And later:
Why do you notice the splinter in your
brother’s eye,
but do not perceive the wooden beam in
your own?
So, what does this have to do with
Church? Well a common understanding of
Church, and one I fall back on without paying attention, is to say that Church
is a place where people go to share their faith with each other and get pumped
about going out and sharing it with others.
But then I think to myself: How
boring!
I like how Rowan Williams puts it: (Church) is first of all a kind of space
cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to
be, and what we have to do about the Church is not first to organize it as a
society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape. It is a place where we can see properly –God,
God’s creation, ourselves.
So I don’t come with all the
answers. I bring my splinters and my
logs knowing that the gospel, alive in the midst of this church, has the power
to pluck out and dislodge. It is
blindness that is in my way. Blindness
is what keeps me from being the person God has in store.
I’ve been both, plucked and a
plucker. Both are better than falling
into a pit;)
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