Healing the Eyes of the Heart: Developing Sacramental Vision
‘We Do Not See Rightly’
My all-time favorite movie is a somewhat obscure Netflix original kid’s movie, ‘The Little Prince’, based off the kid’s book written in 1943 in French by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In such simple, poetic words and imagery it conveys profound truths; every time I watch it I’m struck by new layers of meaning.
One of the lines reads “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Although knowledge of Saint-Exupéry’s personal devotion or adherence to a specific faith is somewhat vague, his line is pretty spot on with a Catholic understanding of spiritual theology and sacramentality.
The Theology of the Body Institute recently published a book, God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, by Karol Wojtyla. It recovers an original retreat for artists given by Wojtyla before he became Pope John Paul II, coupled with reflections and commentary on the connections between the themes of beauty and the Theology of the Body.
In it, Christopher West expounds on the teachings expressed by Wojtyla: that due to original sin, we do not see rightly. We are blinded to the divine plan for human life. (God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, Karol Wojtyla, P. 75)
The Eyes of the Heart
Our blindness comes from a certain disconnect between what we perceive in our minds and the core of our being, our ‘heart’, wherein God dwells as a result of baptism. Instead of hearing the voice of God in our hearts, we hear what we perceive on a surface level. Instead of seeing and understanding with the eyes of faith, we see from whatever framework has formed in our minds due to our circumstances. Channels of the brain are formed in accordance with what we see, hear, and repeat as true to ourselves. We build up a system of beliefs based on our ‘vision’ of how the world is. Habitually we will return to these patterns of thought even though we may intellectually understand our faulty thinking. For example I may understand on a knowledge level that God is with me in all things, yet in a moment of hardship I return to a pattern of thinking “God isn’t with me and I must find my own way out of my circumstance.”
To this the scriptures say “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). And this renewal must take place from the inside out, not by our own strength, not by willing ourselves to see rightly. It must be by a humble return to God, a vulnerability before him, allowing him to broaden and deepen our vision as he illumines the truth in the midst of our circumstances.
Channels of Grace
The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives this definition of grace: “Grace is a participation in the life of God” (CCC. 1997).
This means that avenues of grace are places we actually experience the life of God: Prayer, the Sacraments, and sacramentals. These are given to us as sure places we can encounter him, and EXPERIENCE his life. And what does this encounter really do? Well, in a word, everything! An encounter with God is an encounter with truth itself, beauty itself, goodness itself. In beholding God we behold a true vision, we ‘see rightly’. And the more continually we return to this true vision, the more our minds are aligned to it, our sight is healed, and we are free to operate from our core wherein God dwells without our brain’s patterns holding us captive. This is when outward transformation happens (over time of course, and by the grace of God)- a person takes on the life of Christ and becomes a living icon. The person’s will becomes one with Christ’s will and the Father’s will. He becomes Christ’s vessel of grace, a new living witness, a sacramental, a ‘sign’ of what the life of God looks like. This is the calling for each of us, an invitation to sanctity, total transformation from the inside out.
I could ramble about this for a while, I mean it’s just jaw-dropping when you stop and think about it, nothing less than the point of our existence! But in the interest of succinct-ness I’ll save the rambles for other blogs and move to one last point:
Surrounding ourselves in truth, beauty, goodness
In this journey of transformation, what is there to do but surround ourselves by grace?! Christ is the Good Shephard who will lead us by the hand, for he knows our hearts better than we know ourselves. He will unfold the layers over our hearts steadily and in perfect timing, with just the right circumstances tailored to our needs. We must simply turn to him, seek him. He is always there, always waiting, knocking, ready for that encounter.
And how shall we turn to him? RUN to sources of grace. Even when we don’t see the results we want immediately we can always trust God is at work in us, and isn’t it enough to be in his presence? The clearest sources of grace are prayer and the sacraments. Pray with infallible truth, sit with the scriptures, read and learn about the traditions of the Church.
Secondly there are millions of channels of grace all around us in ‘sacramentals’. All things bearing truth, beauty, and goodness - signs of the eternal all around us, stamped into creation. If we really want to cooperate with the truth that grace presents to us, we must actively counter the unhelpful patterns of thinking in our minds - the direct result of the information we feed ourselves through our senses. If we’re surrounded by negativity, ugliness, lies or even partial-truths, these will feed into our thought patterns and become the tools of the enemy in a war over our perception of reality. Naturally, surrounding ourselves with good things provides access points for God to reach us, and through the discipline of what we allow to enter our minds we will develop what Christopher West refers to as ‘sacramental vision’ (God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, Karol Wojtyla, P. 190), where by God’s grace we begin to perceive his presence all around us. He “Opens the eyes of the blind!” (Psalm 146:8).