Priest Ioan Bădiliță
Meditating at the Gospel from today I remembered a sequence from the wonderful movie Bella (2006), which they say it saved many babies from abortion.
Somewhere in the first part of the movie the characters meet a blind beggar who asks Nina to describe for him the beauty of the day. `I see a tree with yellow and red flowers. It is a day like any other day in New York. Hurried men, cars, everybody has to reach somewhere…Nobody cares of anything. It is like a huge vivid clock. It never stops.
The blind answers:
What wouldn`t I give to be able to see all these things ! At the end of the scene the camera focuses on a cardboard fixed near the leg of the beggar and where it was written> `God closed my eyes. Now I can see. I made stop-motion and I remained for a long time thinking at the deep message of the text.
Beyond the gift of physical sight there is another kind of sight much more dynamic and profound, which searches beyond the esthetical perception of the world feeding itself with the divine reasons/thoughts placed by the Creator in the depths of the sensible universe. In Orthodoxy this way has the name of understanding eyes of the heart which the blind will have open as a lotus flower and without which he couldn`t have let himself be shaped by the healing hand of God. This is what Christ does in fact with him, he rebuilds him by His touch.
When Saint John the Evangelist says that the Lord touched with mud the eyes of the blind I can`t read in any other way but like this> he caressed his eyes. And according to what Jean-Paul Sartre writes in „L’Être et le Néant”, this is not a simple physical contact, but a creative act.
By caressing the other one I make it appear through my touch, under my fingers, his flesh
I think in this lies the miracle from Siloam: to understand that nobody and nothing can fulfill the longing of our heart than the One Who built it and meant it to be a Church of the never fading Light.
