As I was running on the levee this morning, I glanced out at the ‘Father of Rivers’ and was struck with wonder at the density of the fog.  It so obscured my vision that I could not see the other side of the river, and even as I looked at the exact location of the Mississippi River bridge, it was not seen…hidden in the dense morning mist.  Later that morning, my loved one shared his own experience of the same and explained how graceful the sense was that there was a small intimate space of perhaps just a few feet in front of him that was afforded by the fog.  His sight was framed by a small capacity for vision so that there was a certain amount of trust needed to continue to move forward hoping that the vision space would open up in the movement.

The Gospel passage from Luke in today’s liturgy (LK 17: 20-25) reminds me of the power and fragility of sight and what this can mean sometimes…

Asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, Jesus said in reply,
“The coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce,
‘Look, here it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’
For behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”

Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question about ‘when” the Kingdom of God would come by basically saying that the coming of the Kingdom of God is not some ‘thing’ that we will be able to ‘see’ apart from ourselves.  It will not be something that we can point to and say “here it is, or there it is.”  He goes so far as to say that we will not be able to see the Kingdom’s ‘coming’ at all.  And the reason for this is because “the Kingdom of God is among you.”

Now this probably irritated the Pharisees to no end.  The combination of their rigid expectations and their attempts to trip Jesus up in this questioning is basically confounded by Jesus’ answer.  Jesus seems to be clarifying that the Kingdom of God cannot be an event that happens outside of our participation in it.

This puts me in mind of how we see our world many times as a “playing field” that we watch from a distance and pass judgment on from our own “vision space.”  We can feel overwhelmed by the atrocities that are occurring, those that we read about, or see on the television, or maybe ones that we experience in our own personal lives.  This ‘seeing’ can function as a distance created between us and what is occurring or what has happened.  This distance is not a bad thing necessarily but it can become dangerous when it leads to isolation, rigidity, indifference, and violence.

This way of ‘seeing’ that creates a distance can lull us into thinking that we are not part of the present situation, whatever it is.  And our expectations are fueled by this limiting ‘vision space’ so that we look for the fulfillment of our expectations – the ‘Kingdom of God’ – to ‘come’ from somewhere or someone else.  In the worst case scenario, we are here relieving ourselves of responsibility for participating in whatever must happen to give new life to the situation.  I wonder if this is what Jesus might have meant when he told the Pharisees “the Kingdom of God is among you.”

What if the Kingdom of God is the possibility of ‘seeing’ in a way that comes from within us rather than solely from all those external things that we encounter in our everyday world?  What if it’s more than a possibility, but even a pre-given grace inherent within each of us?  If we call this the ‘Kingdom of God,’ then this type of seeing, as a divine gift from God implanted within all of us, is something that we have within us from the start because God shared that with us before we were even born.

Somehow throughout our lives, this way of ‘seeing’ becomes hidden and supplanted by a type of seeing that is formed only by the externalities of our world where meaning is confined to the extent to which our expectations are either met or not.  In this type of seeing, we operate many times on reactions triggered by the fear that our individual expectations of people and things will not be met.  On a good day we are happy when, for the most part at least, we get our way.  However it can be a very bad day when those expectations are not met.  The ‘coming’ of the ‘kingdom of our expectations’ stands are falls according to a seemingly random world that we see as separate from us.  This can become so acute that we cannot even fathom that there is this other way of seeing, an intimate grace already within each one of us that can allow us to participate fully in the Kingdom of God because it is ‘among’ and within us!

The Franciscan theologian, philosopher, and mystic, Bonaventure, wrote about how this attempt to distance or separate ourselves from the world is a ‘darkness’ that prevents us from taking advantage of the grace of what I would call  a “wisdom vision space”  or simply ‘wisdom seeing.’ Bonaventure tells us that our minds become so used to this distancing darkness, of which we are not even conscious, that should we “glimpse the light of the Supreme Being…[our soul] seems to see nothing.”[i] We cannot ‘see’ God in our world because we focus on the content of what we see rather than ‘how’ we see.  We fail to see that our very ability to ‘see’ is the power of God mirrored within us.

When we begin to see from this “wisdom vision space,” we can begin to see all things and people as ‘mirrors’ of God.  The reading from Wisdom (Wis 7:22b–8:1) gives us a beautiful description of the Holy Spirit of God’s Wisdom:

In Wisdom is a spirit, intelligent, holy, unique…
loving the good, keen, unhampered, beneficent,
kindly, firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing…
mobile beyond all motion…the spotless mirror of the power of God…

Then we hear how WE participate in this ‘wisdom vision’:

…passing into holy souls from age to age, she [Wisdom] produces friends of God and prophets…

How powerfully positive is this notion of the ‘kingdom of God?’  It is almost like we are already there, here right now, but we are not ‘seeing’ it.  When we can engage in our world in a way that we ‘see’ in an unhampered, kind, firm, and tranquil manner, we become and produce ‘friends of God and prophets’  This ‘wisdom seeing,’ or seeing through the eyes of wisdom dissolves the imagined separation and distance that we think we have with our world, each other, God, and ourselves.   It is a way of moving through the fog by trusting that our “vision space” is growing bigger and bigger and includes more and more.  And in this very process we become accountable to each other in ways that we have not yet imagined, because we are seeing from a point of wholeness where everyone and everything is ‘in’ and nothing is left out.  It is the most intimate ‘kingdom of God’ where we live as close to each other as God is to us – mirroring the loving gaze of Wisdom among us!

[i] Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey to God, translation and introduction by Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 96-97.  Bonaventure speaks much more broadly and positively about ‘darkness,’ claiming that our soul’s journey into God is marked ultimately by entering a ‘super-luminous darkness’ that includes and embraces all of life as mirroring God in and through us. (p. 114-115).

Peace,

Thomas