Credo

I was an OCIA catechist for a number of years, and every year, the most common questions we fielded from the seekers were about the rules: the rules for what to do during the mass, the rules for the calendar, vestments, fasts, and feasts. It’s not the craziest place to start. From the outside looking in, Catholicism must seem like nothing more than an impenetrable maze of rules and rituals. Once you unlock the rules, you’re in.

Our faith, wrote Pope Benedict XVI, is not simply a set of intellectual propositions requiring our assent. It is about a decisive encounter with a person, an event which enlarges the horizons of our existence and provides a new direction. We see this encounter in three different forms during these final weeks of Lent.

The Samaritan woman encounters Christ at the well, having come alone and in the heat of the day. She is an outcast, but nevertheless encounters Christ in a setting scripturally associated with courtship. Filled with an awareness of the Living Water, she runs posthaste to the people who rejected her to share what has happened, inviting this same community to see for themselves.

Lazarus will be called forth from the cave next week. He will be called from death and darkness by name, returning the light for a time. The family at Bethany along with the mourners and others encounter the Lordship of Jesus in its fullest before the Passion. Indeed, this final sign of Jesus is the first domino to fall on his way to Calvary.

Today the man born blind asks for something he has never had before: his sight. We are reminded throughout this Gospel reading that he was born blind. He wasn’t asking for a restoration of something lost, but rather something he never had. We know the world first through our senses. Imagine for a moment, if you can, what it would be like to receive an entirely new one. It’s difficult; maybe impossible. His new direction is internal, progressing from “I don’t know” to “He is a prophet” to “I believe, Lord.” I can believe he didn’t budge from the very spot where he received his sight. It’s easy to imagine him just looking at everything around him carefully and re-assessing everything he knew about his world with these new sense.

These readings are read at the Scrutinies, a trio of masses in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks of Lent and particularly focused on the catechumens and candidates who will be received into full communion at the Easter Vigil. All three show the decisive encounter with Christ, and the new direction which follows - a direction ordered to discipleship, and the joy of the kerygma. We are called to share it, running with the Samaritan woman. We are called to feel it within, like the man born blind, and we wait patiently for the Lord to call us by name from darkness into light.

Rules are important, certainly. All relationships have them: friend groups, work environments, and the unspoken body of beautiful rules that arise over time during the course of a marriage. It is the love which comes first, though. The rules arise over time as a reflection of that love. Imagine catching the eye of someone across the room, mustering the courage to walk over and say hello, and being met instead with a catalog of rules: on these days we do this, at these times we say these things, we eat such-and-such weekly, and under no circumstances will we do thus. You would be right to do an about-face and exit quickly. First the encounter, then the relationship. Rules will come later, over time. Without that decisive encounter - that first meeting which leads to love, they won’t matter. Our world becomes smaller and darker.

Let us instead enter into someplace larger, knowing this place in new ways. If your world seems small lately, or it seems just ordinary in all of the daily rhythms of life, we can encounter Him today, right here at the altar. We can say with the man born blind “I believe.”

“I believe.”