Forgiveness and healing are for us inextricably linked. We repent and God forgives; and this forgiveness brings healing. His forgiveness removes the burden of guilt and shame and darkness that sin creates within us. His forgiveness sets our hearts at peace and showers us with mercy. His forgiveness assures us that we are his beloved sons and daughters, and each times it deepens our understanding of the Truth.

Jesus was sent into the world to be the light. He is the light which illuminates the whole of reality; which extends beyond the limits of our capacities to perceive and understand.

There is a poem called “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe, perhaps you have heard it? Six blind men from Indostan attempt to define an elephant by describing the part of the animal which each of one is close enough to touch. Now with no overall ability to perceive the creature’s wholeness, each defined one part. Alas, each man was partially right, but because they failed to accept one another’s experiences, all of them were wholly wrong. Each man’s experience was true based on his touch and yet no man’s touch was the whole truth. T’was a paradox.

The worst blindness is to define the whole of reality by how it appears to our partial perspective. When we define God and religion and the Church, by our experience of each, insisting that everyone accept as the whole truth our partial experience, we sow the seeds of division. The poem ends with the men carrying on a long dispute. They disagreed not because they denied the existence of the elephant. They disagreed because they denied one another’s partial perception of the elephant. They failed to see that, even though each was partly right, their failure to accept each other’s perceptions made them all wholly wrong.

The word “catholic” means “wholeness.” This is healthy when genuine and sincere efforts are made to reverence and cherish experiences of truth which are outside of our own. Christ was rejected by the Jews because his claims didn’t match theirs. According to their thinking, Jesus could not have come from God because he worked on the Sabbath. His healing of the man born blind caused the Jews to conclude that he did not keep the Sabbath (Jn 9:16). For the Jews, the Law was the totality and wholeness of God’s will. Whatever existed outside the lines of the Law was outwith God and therefore sinful.

It is not possible for any of us to understand the wholeness of God. We are, however, able by grace to accept our limitations when it comes to understanding the depths of God. The real failure of the men of Indostan was their failure to ask “Is there more to being an elephant than what I am touching?”

Lent, through its prayer, penances and charity, allows us to add together our glimpses of God, for a fuller picture. Surely the end of our faith’s journey lies not in understanding God’s fullness, but in realising that both God and his Kingdom are more than we can understand and in that, we find inspiration for the renewal of one hundred Lents and a shared cause and humility which binds us together?