Readings for the Fourth Sunday in Lent – Laetare Sunday(Year A)
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday March 19, 2023.
The relatively new practice of Forest Therapy involves a guide who is trained to bring people into a therapeutic encounter with the healing power of the forest. The primary way that the guide opens the door to this encounter is by inviting participants to engage with the forest through their five senses. One of the first invitations in a Forest Therapy Walk is always to engage with our sense of vision, to look and see what is in motion around us. Sometimes on a more still and quiet day in the forest, participants assume nothing is in motion until they look more closely and see the subtle trembling of leaves and the gentle billowing of cobwebs across veins of bark and branches. This invitation calls us to slow down, to be present, and to align our body’s rhythms with the rhythm of the forest. The invitation also summons us to move from a habit of merely looking to the practice of deeper seeing. Sometimes the Forest Therapy Guide reinforces this with a subsequent invitation to pick up a handful of dirt or soil or even mud and smell it and maybe even taste it and then spend time observing all the tiniest details within it. This practice of deeper seeing also involves what is called “imaginal vision,” in which an informed imagination colors one’s experience. So, when observing a handful of soil, one can see through imaginal vision the microscopic life and activity and entire ecosystem therein, the bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms, tardigrades, all those tiny creatures that vivify the world through their breeding and dying.[1] These Forest Therapy practices echo an invitation that I see in today’s Gospel: to move from looking to seeing. Another name for a spiritually enlightened person or guru is a seer, as opposed to a looker. The Gospel of John invites us all into this enlightenment so that we all become seers.[2]
So much of spiritual enlightenment is about how we see the world around us, how we see ourselves, how we learn to see as God sees. In our reading from First Samuel, which includes several “lookers” (in both senses of that word), we learn that “the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD sees the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). One important way that we can cultivate this seeing of the heart is by employing some of the wisdom of forest therapy, by using a compassionate imaginal vision. When we see each other, we can imagine with compassion the unique stories in which we all find ourselves, the hard battles we might each be fighting, the painful wounds as well as the hope-filled joys. There’s a quote attributed to Plato: “Be compassionate, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” We don’t need to know all the details of one’s personal battles to be compassionate and see others through the lens of compassionate imaginal vision. This is how we can learn to see beyond just looking.
Today’s Gospel reading includes the entirety of John chapter 9. Because our Gospel was extra-long today, I’ll try to keep the sermon short even though that’s going to be hard for me since I’ve written a book on this chapter, which I’d be happy to lend to anyone. Today, I want to focus on how Jesus helps the man born blind see by giving him an experience of being seen. Throughout the chapter, the man born blind is mostly looked at by others as an object, an object for theological speculation (“Who sinned this man or his parents?”), a tool for investigating and adjudicating and condemning Jesus, and as an example of exclusion from the synagogue.[3] Even the man’s parents seem to treat him as an object. Jesus is the only one who sees the man born blind as a subject, as a human being with agency.
Not only does Jesus heal the man born blind, but he also humanizes him. Jesus uses his imaginal vision when he sees the dirt and soil on the ground beneath him. Jesus doesn’t just look at the soil, he sees it and he sees the healing and life-giving powers therein. Of course, Jesus knew the story of how God made humanity out of dirt. The name of the first human “Adam” comes from the Hebrew word “Adamah” which means dirt, the clay of the earth. We are God-breathed dust; we are animated dirt.[4] By infusing his life-giving breath and saliva into the dirt, Jesus was not only revealing his divine identity as Creator,[5] he was also helping everyone else to see that this man was a human being made from the humus of the earth, a subject with a story and not just an object for debate. After this encounter with Jesus, the man born blind takes center stage and ends up having more speaking roles than Jesus, who is off stage for most of the chapter. When Jesus and the man born blind reconnect at the end of the Gospel, we learn that the man has not only been given the power to look with his healed eyes, but also to see, to see and worship Christ as the Son of Man, to see in ways that reveal the spiritual blindness of others.
My invitation for us is to move from a habit of just looking to a practice of seeing, seeing as God sees, seeing with our compassionate imaginal vision into the hearts and souls of those around us. I also wonder, when was the last time you felt really seen as opposed to being looked at? Those are very different experiences, right? Being looked at versus being seen? Consider the last time you felt truly seen. Treasure that experience and then reflect on ways that you can give that gift to others so that they feel seen in your presence. May we learn to move beyond looking to seeing, so that we, enlightened by the Light of the world, become seers through whom Christ shines. Amen.
[1] “There is an entire ecosystem in a handful of soil: bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, earthworms. Through their breeding and dying such creatures vivify the world.” Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 2 -3, 13, as cited in Diana Butler Bass, Grounded, 50.
[2] “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” John 1:9
[3] The disciples’ question to Jesus about the man born blind reminds me of a scene from the film Patch Adams (1998) in which an instructor and medical students treat a diabetes patient in the hospital as a mere object of study and then frighten the patient by discussing the worst-case scenario. The medical students ask various questions about her condition and then Patch Adams confounds everyone by asking, “What’s her name?” thus humanizing the patient. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itixiJmsLsM
[4] Diana Butler Bass, Grounded, 42.
[5] John Chrysostom said that Jesus used clay for the healing “to teach he himself was the Creator in the beginning of the world.” Homiliae in Joannem, 56.2, Goggin, 89, 91, as cited in Miriam DeCock, Interpreting the Gospel of John in Antioch and Alexandria, 146.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 