Occlusion

Adam and Eve

Written on the 1st Day of the 32nd Week of Ordinary Time - 2006 AD - (Year B)

God's grace is the method by which we can be saved in our temporal life on earth. Sin occludes us from grace, like the Moon sometimes eclipses the Sun. And when we are cut off from the warmth and life giving radiance of grace we wilt and die. When you are in the depths of winter, you can barely imagine the heat and warmth and light of the sun. So you huddle before an artificial source of warmth, some object, another person, a created thing. It is only when the season changes, your world thaws and the glorious Sun rises again that you remember the joy of warmth and wonder how you ever lived without it. This is freedom. Freedom from sin. Sin and occlusion from grace forces you into the world, it forces you to look for gratification in created things, becoming the serpent that feeds on itself with a hunger that cannot be satisfied, swallowing its own tail. When you pray you begin to open the door to grace, or you start to pull back the curtain, bit by bit, until the light floods in and burns away the darkness. In avoiding sin you truly begin to see the world with new eyes. I remember thinking recently, that I hadn't seen something in a certain way since I was a child. A street with winter trees moving in the wind, a rusty iron railing. It just was what it was, truly beautiful, looking at it through the eyes of a child, God's miraculous world. Being free from sin is the truest temporal Freedom which Christ grants us in the world. The less we sin the more we acknowledge the sins of our past and wish to confess and become free of them also. God shows us all this in His endless Love and kindness, our lives in His grace foreshadowing what we must finally become.

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