HYMN Christ Be Our Light (Bernadette Farrell)
OPENING PRAYER
GOSPEL JOHN 9:1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38
What word or phrase speaks to you? Challenges you? Comforts you?
SILENCE/REFRAIN
The Gospel is read a second time.
MEDITATION
The primary theme of the Gospel for the Fourth Sunday of Lent is the triumph of light over darkness. The formerly blind man gradually has his eyes, heart, and mind opened to the truth about Jesus, the Light of the world. The man moves from speaking about the man called Jesus who made clay and anointed my eyes and told me to ‘Go to Siloam and wash’, to identifying and naming Jesus a prophet, to testifying to receiving sight for the first time in his life, to finally believing in and worshipping Jesus.
Coming to insight, sight, and vision is a gradual process. How do I participate in the gift(s) God bestows on me?
REFLECTION, SUNG REFRAIN
CONTEMPLATION
Let us continue to sit with this Gospel, welcoming Jesus to open our eyes, hearts, and minds to him, the LIGHT of the WORLD.
SILENT REFLECTION, SUNG REFRAIN
LORD’S PRAYER AND CONCLUSION
CONCLUDING PRAYER
How the Light Comes
I cannot tell you how the light comes.
What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining.
That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us.
That it loves searching out what is hidden/ what is lost / what is forgotten or in peril or in pain.
That it has a fondness for finding its way / for tracing the edges toward flesh of form /
for shining forth through the eye, the hand, the heart.
I cannot tell you how the light comes, but that it does. That it will work its way into the deepest dark that enfolds you, though it may seem long ages in coming
or arrive in a shape you did not foresee.
And so may we this day turn ourselves toward it. May we lift our faces to let it find us.
May we bend our bodies to follow the arc it makes.
May we open and open more / and open still to the blessed light that comes.
- Jan Richardson .
Reflections are written by Sister Teresita Weind, SNDdeN.