When the conditions on a racetrack are just right, and when one of the horses is clearly leading the others by at least a good body length or so, the hooves of that lead horse can kick up clumps of dirt and mud, which can land in the faces of the horses trailing behind.
That horse-racing image crept into American taverns in the late nineteenth century as a toast while clinking beer mugs and signaling victory for the speaker: “Here’s mud in your eye!”
Clouded or obscured vision tied to one’s standing in a race is one among many examples of physical sight as way to speak of knowledge or insight. “Oh, I see,” someone might say, referring to nothing in their physical line of sight but rather to their cognitive acuity.
This figure of speech and its many analogues are remarkably widespread, across nearly all cultures. Some have even suggested that eyesight—the physical act of seeing—is the primary way we gather information about the world around us.
(I have to say, I’m not entirely persuaded about the primacy of vision. American philosopher Richard Rorty was fond of pushing against such claims by wondering why seeing something should give us more knowledge about it than, say, rubbing up against it, or hearing it, or embracing it. The obsession with ranking lurks around these possibilities, too, as if we must always identify the best or the only way truly to know something for really real.)
The common contrast between dark and light, between shadow and illumination, likely plays a role here, too: what we truly know has come into the light of day. Nearly all of the world’s religious traditions embrace such contrasts to describe enlightenment and spiritual awareness, and the Lenten lectionary gave us a classic story about this just yesterday, the story from John’s account of the Gospel (9:1-41) about Jesus giving a man born blind the gift of sight.
Images of light paired with sight create the moment of divine encounter in this story when, as we like to say, “seeing is believing.” John notes directly the spiritual significance of this moment as it becomes entangled with religious regulations. While the gift Jesus offers surely counts as a reason to celebrate, the religious leaders of that man’s community are thoroughly skeptical and even resentful about it.
In fact, this long reading from John’s Gospel is mostly about religious resentment, about a near-comedic refusal of those first-century religious leaders to recognize a moment worthy of shared praise and celebration. John likewise uses images of sight for such religious folly with a reversal of fortune motif: the one born blind, now can see; the ones who should have seen, are now blind.
Full transparency: I’m a religious leader, too. I’m just as complicit in religious foolishness as those first-century figures. I know only too well how easy it is to get so caught up in the gears and gadgets of institutional religious life that we miss the very life-giving presence of God among us—we just can’t see it!
Religion can cloud our vision, but so can patriotism, and nationalism, and ethnicity, and money, and gender. Our social identities and strategies for navigating our relationships can act like blinders, rendering us oblivious to the wider world all around us.
“Wake up!” says the Pauline writer to the Ephesians—another great image for insight and awareness in yesterday’s lectionary texts (5:8-14). Waking up, of course, can happen in a number of ways, including opening one’s eyes and seeing, but also (as Rorty would remind us) touching, listening, showing up, paying attention, living bravely, forming communities of trust, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable, to name just a few of the many ways we can awaken to God’s presence.
Two weeks ago, the Lenten lectionary gave us Nicodemus at night, under the cover of darkness; last week, the woman at the well in the bright light of day; and now sight for the man born blind: throughout John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus is waking people up, and showing them the truth, and inviting them to walk the good road toward abundant life.
John is also clear about this: traveling that road is risky, and not everyone is happy to see the truth come to light, and seeing truly may well cost us nothing less than everything—this Lenten road leads to the Cross, after all. And let’s not fail to notice that the gift of sight to the man born blind cost him his religious community, his home, his friends, and family.
To “wake up” and begin seeing even hints of the truth can cause us to question where we really belong, and with whom, and for what purpose, and to reject even religion if it offers anything less than thriving, authentic life.
I love the First Nations Version of this story, an indigenous translation our parish enjoys during Lent. In that version, the man born blind asked Jesus to tell him who the Chosen One might be, and Jesus said “look at me”—to the one born blind, he said look at me and see the One chosen to live as the “True Human Being”—woke, compassionate, devoted to healing.
Yes, and, all of that said, why the mud? Seriously, why mud?
Jesus encounters this man born blind, and his first impulse is to spit in the dirt, make mud, and smear it on the man’s eyes? Really? I’m surely not the only one who is just a bit too germ-phobic to relish the idea of having muddy spit on my eyes.
Why would John—supposedly the highly sophisticated, intricately philosophical Gospel writer—why would John include this literally dirty detail? Doesn’t this seem, well, rather primitive and crude, especially by modern Western standards?
Reading this story in the First Nations Version prompted me to reflect a bit more than I usually do on Jesus firmly planted in the land itself—on Jesus, in other words, as indigenous to the land of the Mediterranean basin. He was not only an itinerant preacher and teacher, but also a traditional healer. (A number of insightful thinkers continue to help me bridge my Western Christian convictions and indigenous practices, including Randy Woodley.)
Indigenous healers of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds around the world are typically attuned to what we modern people often call (sometimes dismissively) “natural remedies.” In that light, of course Jesus is rooted in the Earth, the land, and yes, the dirt as he makes mud for a healing salve.
Reading such stories from a gilt-edged, leather-bound book extracts these earthy stories from their natural habitat. We have so sterilized and sanitized and intellectualized these ancient texts that we have all but forgotten their fleshy origins in the land, in the dirt itself, which it turns out has healing properties.
The Latin word for soil is humus; that’s also at the root (as it were) of the word “human.” Dirt is not inert; it brings forth life, and not only our life—the soil itself teems with all sorts of life.
The failure to thrive that leads to death happens quickly when we tear apart the bond between human and humus, between creatures of Earth and the soil. That certainly describes today’s ecological crisis, and the deadly consequences of removing ourselves from Earth herself, where—along with the air and water—God’s own Spirit of life resides. (Yet another example of religious blindness is my constant struggle to suppose God resides somewhere “out there,” way beyond the sky, the stars, the edge of the Universe itself; the Spirit of Life, the Source of all living things is instead everywhere around us and in us–and I’m convinced that this conviction alone would change the world.)
These traces of traditional healing practices—and regardless of whether the Johannine writer intended this—evokes the indigenous bonds to the land which we need so desperately to recover today, and suggests what a twenty-first century Lenten practice really ought to entail: repairing our relationship with Earth.
It just so happens that we’re reading this story not only in Lent but also Women’s History Month. So let’s be sure to note how patriarchal systems associate Earth-based traditions with women (and are thus easily dismissed), while text-based traditions belong to men (who hold the power of interpretation and thus authority to decide what is true). More pointedly, feminizing Earth makes her suitable for male control, for ravaging, and for plundering, and for extracting resources whenever we please. This is exactly and literally and not merely metaphorically what Jeffrey Epstein was doing with girls and women on his Island of Misfit Billionaires.
Repairing, it seems to me, likewise means this: refusing to choose between Earth and Text, between healing and knowledge, or indeed between female and male.
Either/or, binary choices are part and parcel of the problem that wounds us, and they are far too limiting in the wonders of a world God has created, not for division and separation but for communion. John’s Jesus is, in every Johannine story, perfectly attuned to the energies of Earth and also to the presence of Creator God; his ministry (and most of the so-called “miracles”) quote often consisted in revealing and disclosing that deep harmony between Earth and Creator for the sake of healing and abundant Life.
That harmony (and the communion it creates) is the precious circle of light into which we are invited to step—or really, urged to step. There’s no time to waste: Let’s step fully into that light and shine as beacons of the Gospel in a grim and violent society, inviting others to wake up with us, not only to see with the heart, but to feel with the soul, and to hear with ears tuned to the rhythms of God’s presence thrumming and vibrating in the loamy soils of Earth.
Jesus spit into the dirt and made mud; Jesus made mud pies, and then he spread them on a blind man’s eyes for the gift of sight: returning to Earth—repairing and healing our relationship with Earth—this will make us shine, just like Jesus, as light for the world.
(And by the way, among the many things such light would illumine—to recall where this blog post began—is hope for horses to live a life free of entertaining humans. Severe suffering often results from their coerced performances, and sometimes dying in horrible pain because of it. The efforts to ban horse-drawn carriages in New York City continue for that reason as Mayor Mamdani indicated his commitment to ending the practice, but opposition to the ban has been fierce. It’s time to invite other species with us into that circle of Gospel light—free of saddles, free of harnesses, free of human domination.)
