Christ Church

Lord, that I may receive my sight

The most important thing that has happened to you this week, perhaps, is that you have heard the reading from Luke 18.31-41. Coupled with the Paul’s wonderful hymn of love in 1st Corinthians 13, it speaks directly to the journey of our humanity. The concept of life as a journey is a commonplace but that doesn’t take away from its significance. The idea of a journey implies a destination, a place to which we are going but aren’t there yet. It suggests that there are limitations and obstacles which have to be overcome or engaged.

These two readings, the one which we heard in Chapel this week, the other a few weeks ago belong to the Christian preparation for Lent, a spiritual season of renewal and discipline. The essential elements of the Christian journey of the soul to God have their counterparts in the spiritual traditions of the other great religions and philosophies of the world. The journey is about illumination, purgation, and union or perfection. The reading from Luke as complemented with Paul’s great hymn of love speaks directly to the very nature of education. It, too, is about illumination or enlightenment, about purgation or the clearing of our minds and souls from all the clutter and chaos that results in confusion and disarray, and about union, a sense of oneness and wholeness of our being. But what makes this readings so particularly powerful is that they show us the essential conjunction of knowing and loving.

To put the point, very simply, there can be no learning, no journey without the desire to know. As Aristotle rather famously (or infamously) notes, “all men desire by nature to know.” In one way or another, the activity of thinking and knowing is fundamental to what it means to be human. Coupled to that activity is the activity of desire, of wanting to know, of love. The Gospel highlights this interconnection. Jesus says, “behold, we go up to Jerusalem.” There is a journey. He explains exactly what the journey means. It means the things of his passion and death out of which comes his resurrection. He tells them – us – what it means. But, as Luke puts it, “they understood none of these things.”

Ideas are constantly being set before you that challenge you in the classroom and in Chapel and in the various interactions that make up the life of a school, itself an institution dedicated to the pursuit of learning. You are being taught but have you learned? Luke’s observation raises the question about what will it take for us to learn what is wanted to be known. It will mean to know, as Paul puts it, that we often see “but in a glass darkly.” It will mean that we confront our ignorance, our not knowing. But to know that we don’t know is the important first step towards wanting to know, wanting to learn. Without the desire to know, there can be no learning, no knowing.

If the Gospel reading simply stopped at the moment of our not understanding, it would be an arrested development, almost an impasse, a negative and cause for despair. But it doesn’t. It goes on to talk about “a certain blind man sitting by the wayside” while the multitude with Jesus pass by. The point is that we as students, as those who are committed to the quest for understanding, have to be like that blind man. Why and how? Because he incessantly calls out to Jesus. Despite the remonstrations of the disciples he insists in calling out to Jesus for mercy. Jesus wonderfully and importantly asks him what in fact God as truth is asking each of us. What do you want? The blind man says what in fact we all truly want. “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” To want to see is to want to know.

Knowing and loving or desiring are intimately and necessarily connected. Plato, too, will use the word eros to signal the passionate desire to know. Illumination is a critical feature of Hinduism in the idea of following (and therefore coming to know) your Dharma. Buddhism actually means enlightenment, particularly an enlightenment about the forms of attachment that contribute to suffering from which one seeks to be freed – a kind of purgation. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all display the pattern of the journey in terms of illumination, purgation and union or perfection. So, too, is the ancient journey of the mind in the quest for knowledge and understanding.

The journey speaks to these fundamental aspects of our humanity which are often obscured and hidden from view in the confusions of our contemporary culture. We often default to external problems and circumstances and forget about our own accountability as knowers and about our own agency with respect to knowing and acting ethically and responsibly upon our learning and knowing. To recall this is to reclaim the freedom and dignity of our humanity. It requires discipline and commitment for such things belong to the inner desire of the soul to know and to love. And it connects us to one another in a community of learning and loving. We are not alone in the journey. “Behold,” Jesus says “we go up” with God and with one another.

Like the blind man, we have to know our blindness in order to seek for sight and understanding. That seeking is our desiring to see and to know. Without that love there can be no journey.

(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy