“Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.”  (1 Sm 16:7)
 
How’s your eyesight?  What do you see when you look at the world around you?  That seems to be the issue in today’s Gospel.  As the story opens, we meet a man whom everyone assumes is a sinner because he is blind (John9:2). But by the end of the story, Jesus says that those who claim they can see are really the ones in darkness. 
 
We often believe what we see before us — a work challenge, a child’s errant behavior, a friend who could use a hand —  but if we don’t look through the lens of Jesus’ love, we don’t see as clearly.  This truth becomes evident when our self-motivated and sometimes judgmental attempts do not inspire growth, true friendship, deeper love.  Something is not quite right.
 
In order to see and to believe, our eyes must be trained on their object, and the gaze must be animated by a minimum of sympathy.  So it was with the blind man in John’s Gospel.  Even before receiving his visual sight, he trusted Jesus.  We know his inner vision had become more crystalline when he said, “I do believe Lord, and he worshipped Him.  This miraculous phenomenon: “Loving makes us see… The dawning of this love is the desire for access to that ‘new nature,’ sanctifying grace, that causes us to believe, i.e., to see signs of the supernatural in the visible world.”
 
How welcome is the season of Lent, during which our humbled gaze focuses on the one who gives us a “new nature” that sees, in all that is before us, signs of His presence.  It is this love that renders our efforts joyful, transformative, and visionary.
 
(Source:  Excerpts from The Magnificat/Lenten Companion/Lent 2020/March 22, 2020)