I remember spending several weeks of the summer during my youth in Mobile, Alabama, visiting my Dad’s mom and family.  One particular summer, while writing a letter home, my Grandma Telhiard noticed that I was placing my face very close to the page of the letter that I was writing.  She asked me “Can you see?”  With my face practically touching the page upon which I was writing, I said “yes.”  Needless to say, it was at that point that we discovered that I needed glasses.

My first pair of glasses were wire-rimmed, and in my excitement upon getting them, I took off running, taking in, with new-found wonder, everything in my “sight”…..until BOOM!  While looking around at everything about me, I had unexpectedly run smack dab into a telephone pole.  I can clearly remember my Dad’s perplexed face, when I showed up back at the house with the mangled glasses in my hand.  And his somewhat comical question to me, “And you couldn’t see before getting glasses?”

Although the Gospel today (MT 18: 15-20) does not overtly mention sight, the way that we “see” the world and each other does seem to present itself in the scripture. We hear Jesus’ instructions on how we should approach each other when there is some type of disagreement or wrongdoing.  First, we are told to approach the person with whom we have had a disagreement to try to resolve the issue.  If that doesn’t work, then we should bring some others into the situation.   This is not so much a “ganging up” on anyone here, but maybe more a broadening of perspective that can soothe and/or clarify any situation where there is disagreement or pain.

It seems to me that we may all wear some type of “glasses” through which we receive and interpret the world around us and our relationships with others.  The “glasses” we look through “color” the situations we find ourselves in and can elicit responses that are loving, encouraging, and affirming, and sometimes narrow, confining, and exclusive. Hurt feelings undoubtedly arise in our relationships with others, and many times these are the result of the “glasses” being worn by both ourselves and others.

Jesus talks about “taking one or two along with you” when you approach a potentially negative situation, so that an environment of true listening can be formed.   It’s as if our best chance of really “seeing” is correlated to a community of “glasses,” or of different ways of seeing.  This is not a comfortable prospect necessarily.  But it does seem to provide one way “out” of a negative situation, or perhaps better, a way “into” a new way of seeing things.

Sometimes we have to literally run or smash into something to pay attention to that which is directly in front of us.  We may have to “break” our “glasses.”  Sometimes it takes someone else’s way of “seeing” to challenge us in that way.  Or even more so, it takes a community of “glasses” to really focus on the truest meaning and deepest challenges presented us.  And it could be at this point, that we can all actually take off our “glasses!”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Paleontologist and Theologian, described a way of seeing the entire cosmos as a “Universal” longing or desire to be connected.  Out of the seeming diversity in our universe, there is a connection that attracts us and drives us forward and toward each other.  He goes so far as to say that this is the Christ in all things and in all people.   If we are attuned, we can see the love of God in everything and everyone, as a vibrant “glowing” manifestation of the energy of God that connects all of us by both healing and building us up. It appears that we are attracted to each other for our own good and that our shared desire for something beyond ourselves is the driving force of connection that both heals and builds.

If we can begin to “see” everything and everyone through the inherent connection that we have, i.e., through Christ, then I think our glasses may “break” if necessary, or at least, become more clear through a shared “seeing” transformed by communal love and respect – a clearer vision.  This is perhaps yet another meaning we can find in the closing words of today’s Gospel…

“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Peace,

Thomas