By Insight Not by Sight
Perception is not always reality. In other words, our eyes can sometimes deceive us.
In his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul famously writes, “For we live by faith and not by sight” (5:7). Is Paul telling us that we should just put on blind folds and blindly walk through life hoping that everything will turn out fine? Not at all! At the time of Paul’s writing Corinth was a wealthy metropolitan port with several “shiny” distractions that were not too different from major metropolitan hubs today, like my own Toronto.
Photo by Yeshi Kangrang on Unsplash
Emerging from the subway steps onto Dundas Square in the heart of downtown Toronto we are immediately bombarded with shiny colourful advertisements, loud music, and several restaurants, cafes, and outlet stores swarming with people. All these distractions can easily lead us to miss a reality that exists under the surface.
Homeless men and women begging for food and money, drug addicts, the garbage in alleyways, police attentively scanning the area for any possible crime and those things that are even hidden from all our of our senses, like the inner brokenness or happiness of the people who fall into our sight. These are all things that lie under the surface of regular sight.
When St. Paul encourages the Corinthians to live by “faith” he is asking them to look past the sea of distractions and see reality for what it really is. In today’s first reading the author of Proverbs puts a different spin on Paul’s words writing, “Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight” (Proverbs 9:6). The Oxford dictionary defines insight as “The capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of someone or something” (Oxford Dictionary Online).
So to live by faith, from the Catholic perspective, is to live by insight – to see deep, past the surface of what in front of our eyes. Living by sight, according to Proverbs, is to be immature. To live by sight is to live a superficial life; a life of distractions. Living by faith (or insight) allows us to see past the “shiny things” seeking our attention. It allows us to see the dignity of the homeless person begging for money at the entrance to the subway station; it allows us to see the alcoholics and drug addicts desperately seeking for a way out; it allows us to see the prostitutes on the corners of Dundas and Yonge as daughters, sisters, and mothers.
In my opinion, living by faith is the more intellectually stimulating and honest approach to life.
Receiving the Eucharist by Faith Not By Sight
The above principle of living by faith also applies to our understanding of the Eucharist. In today’s gospel Jesus exclaims no fewer than five times that we must “eat” his “flesh” to have eternal life.
The intensity of the words used by Jesus in John 6:51-56 can make some feel uncomfortable. Is Jesus advocating cannibalism? That sounds crazy. So he must be speaking symbolically, right?
Both of these views are actually wrong. First, cannibalism is the eating of one’s own species deceased flesh. Jesus is not asking us to eat his dead body. He refers to himself as the “living bread” that “came down from heaven” (v.57), making himself analogues to the manna from heaven that God gave the Israelites in the wilderness. Jesus is also analogues to the male lamb without blemish that God commanded the Israelites to eat in remembrance of the Passover; hence, Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God in the Bible on multiple occasions. So in the Eucharist we consume not normal human flesh, but Christ’s glorified body that he reveals to his disciples after the Resurrection.
Second, our sight might convince us that the host and wine are nothing more than symbols. But remember, perception isn’t always reality, especially when it comes to God, who is not resticted by the laws material reality. St. Thomas Aquinas explained that through a process called trans-substation the ordinary bread and wine become Christ’s living transfigured body. In philosophical terms this is considered an “accident” – something that should not happen, but happens anyway. Normally, bread and wine should not turn into different substances, but in trans-substantiation – which is the accident – it becomes the body and blood of Christ, yet to our physical senses the appearance of bread and wine remain.
So sight tells us that we are consuming nothing more than bread and wine, but our insight (or faith) tells us it is Christ’s body and blood.
Conclusion
In my opinion, it’s too easy live by sight. If we want to see reality as it is intended to be seen we have to step outside of ourselves and view the world though insight, or in other words, faith.
