Our long experience with COVID-19 has had a number of serious effects during the past two years. Beyond the serious and long-term health complications, our society has experienced economic fragility, supply chain disruption, staffing shortages, social isolation and mental-health consequences.
But one under-recognized effect of the pandemic has been its toll on our eyesight. So perhaps it’s time for an “eye exam.”
If you are struggling to see the connection, the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday might help to clarify. With a rather playful sense of hyperbole, Jesus asks: “Why look at the splinter in your brother’s eye when you miss the wooden beam in your own?”
As a result of the many stresses created by the pandemic, we have sought to identify the failings in the people and institutions around us as a way of coping with a situation beyond our control.
One way we do this is to group people together based on common characteristics – the masked, the unmasked, the vaxers, the anti-vaxers, the privileged, the undeserving, the school system, the health-care system, the diocese, the bishops, the government.
And, yes, people in each group have sins and failings. But while we focus on those failings, the beams or planks in our own field of vision prevent us from seeing our own sinfulness, which includes our responsibility for helping to fashion an increasingly hostile world.
Those beams or planks also prevent us from recognizing that those we find fault with are still the beloved of God, His children, created in His image and likeness and for whom He wills the same everlasting communion with Him that we desire.
Happily, Lent is the perfect time to have our vision checked by asking our heavenly physician, Jesus, to show us the beams and planks that we must remove to help those around us by acting as He would have us act.
If we are open to a checkup from our heavenly physician, we might also want to have Him look at our hearts. In the same Gospel reading from the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Jesus says: “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil; for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”
Our hearts might need a bypass from the blockages of past hurts and misplaced loves so that we are able to truly will the good of those around us. Jesus can diagnose our maladies and also heal us in the sacrament of reconciliation. The only requirement is recognizing that we are sick and need His help.
This Lent, we might find the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Examination of Conscience in light of Catholic Social Teaching useful before our checkup: https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacramentals/penance/examination-conscience-in-light-of-catholic-social-teaching.
Be well!