“…I am the light of the world” (RSV, John 9:5)

Our Lord spoke these words as he prepared to heal a blind man in Jerusalem and in speaking them he turned the miracle into an acted parable. The man in question had been born blind and Our Lord gave him his sight, by anointing his eyes with clay and sending him to wash them clean in the nearby pool of Siloam.

That blind man is symbolic of the state of inner blindness in which you and I and everyone else were born into this world. That blindness is both intellectual and spiritual, being an ignorance both of God himself and of the state of our real selves in his sight.

Suppose that, like Tarzan in the story, you had been lost in the jungle in your infancy, and had been nurtured and brought up by the creatures of the wild. You would know nothing about God: your reason might lead you to speculate on the cause of life around you, but you would probably get no farther than did primitive human beings and attribute it to the sun.

You would be entirely ignorant about the purpose of your creation and equally ignorant of all God has done, in the Person of Jesus Christ, to make possible the final fulfilment of that purpose, namely, the eternal enjoyment of God’s visible Presence.

Those truths, and many others, which are so familiar to us now, have not come to us by instinct nor by reason. They have been revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ and communicated to us through his Church.