I Was Blind but Now I See

A parable of the spiritual path

Kelly Flanagan

Aug 21, 2024

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-9:51

Jesus spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” … So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. (John 9: 6-7)

He is not a hard man to find—the legendary are more easily located.

The first-century Jewish market is noisy and bustling by its own standards, but nearly silent relative to a twenty-first century city. No engines revving. No horns honking. Nothing moving faster than a donkey.

At first, when I ask about the man, I get no response. Then I mention the Pool of Siloam, and eyes light up. Like an ancient game of telephone, I am pointed toward his home.

It’s at the south edge of Lower City. A limestone structure mortared together by something like stucco. The front door is ajar and reveals a small courtyard open to the sky. I enter cautiously.

Embers glow in a fire pit of sorts situated in the center of the space. The dark insides of tiny rooms can be seen through doorways on the three interior walls. A lilting soprano drifts down from the flat roof above the room to my left.

I call out the man's name. The singing stops. Moments pass. From the shadows of the room straight ahead, a gray-haired man emerges, leaning on a limb of something smoothed into a cane. His countenance is somehow both suspicious and safe.

“I’ve come a long way,” I say, “to ask you about that day at the pool.”

He smiles a smile of both goodwill and fatigue. “Many have come to ask,” he says. “None have gone with the answers they sought.” He’s speaking Hebrew but I’m hearing it in English. This is not the first time such magic has been worked within these city walls. “They want to know about the moment of the miracle.” He shakes his head. “How it worked. How it felt. I know nothing of how it worked. It felt like birth. I ask my visitors what their birth felt like. They can’t tell me, and neither can I tell them.”

His feet shuffle, rotating in the direction of his dwelling place.

“I’m not interested in the miracle,” I say.

He stops and cranes his neck in my direction. "Then you'll want to talk about the man Jesus, whether he was of God or Satan, but I have already said everything I have to say about that."

I shake my head. "No, where I come from I can read what you said on that subject."

He reverses his rotation, turning back in my direction. “Then you’ll want to know about the walk to the pool. How a blind man found his way. All I can tell you is that it was a long and uncertain walk, and sweat can sting even a blind man’s eyes, muddied or not.”

“No,” I say. “I’m not interested in the walk, though I do admire you for it.”

He is facing me fully once again. His eyes are question marks.

“I want to know what life is like after the miracle."

The question marks in his eyes are replaced by exclamation points. “This is what no one ever asks, because they think they already know the answer," he says.

He shuffles onto one of two rough-hewn benches next to the fire and points to the other. I take my seat there. He stirs the embers with his cane and they grow brighter, crackle. Then he smiles slightly, and speaks.

“Stories don’t end like we tell them,” he says. “They go on.”

The woman above begins her song once more. He turns his face up to it like it’s sunlight. Moisture gathers at the corners of his closed eyes.

"My daughter singing to my granddaughter," he explains. "The same song my wife sang to her when she was a child."

"Your wife?" I ask, scanning the other doorways for signs of life.

"She has gone on to heaven.” He pauses to listen to his daughter's song. “But also, she hasn't." A tear trickles toward his chin. "It would be easier if she were here. It would be easier if she were gone. But she is both here and gone, and that is very, very hard."

There's a Portuguese word for what he's describing: saudade. It means the presence of absence.

"It would have been easier to say goodbye to her had I been blind. There would have been less of her to lose. The honey color of her skin. The sun reflecting off the waves of her hair. Her one front tooth crossed ever so slightly over the other. If I’d been blind, I would not have had to lose the tiny freckle beneath her left eye, or the way she saw me with those eyes. It is one thing to see, it is quite another to be seen, and yet another to lose the one you've seen seeing you."

He opens his eyes and his gaze returns to the embers, which are flickering with flame again.

"You want to know about life after the miracle?” he continues. “Life after you've been touched by the divine? It is not what you think."

"So you wish Jesus had left you blind?" I ask, trying not to sound as if I'm accusing him of ingratitude, and failing to my own ears.

His head whips in my direction, a fire brighter in them than the one at his feet.

"And miss the color of everything? The red of the sunrise and blood on broken skin and the fire?” He stabs his cane into the embers, sending up sparks. “No! Never. I would miss nothing of what I've seen."

"But...I don't understand. You said seeing it has made it more painful."

"Yes," he says with a sigh, as if relieved I'm speaking sense again. "This is what no one wants to discuss."

He pauses for a long while, the way you might pause as you try to condense many ideas into one. When he speaks again, it is in a whisper.

"The divine path doesn’t become easier.”

As if on cue, the singing stops. The day sits still around the pronouncement. Somewhere unseen, an animal grunts and snorts in seeming protest. Something in me grunts and snorts, too.

“Where I come from,” I say, “that’s not how we tend to think of spirituality. We think if we’re doing it right, it will deliver us from the harder things. Our uncertainty will become clarity. Our fear will become faith. Our pain will become pleasure. Our struggles will become success. Our prayers will be answered. Our destiny determined.”

He smiles a small smile again. “Yes,” he says, “we have that too, but that is not the divine path. That is a business. A salesman will tell you that seeing is the end of the story. On the divine path, however, it is just the beginning.”

“What do you mean?”

He answers my question with a question. “What does it mean to love?”

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “To will the good of another.”

He suddenly waves his hands in the air before him, like he’s swatting away a cloud of gnats. “Good!” he exclaims. “Good and bad is too simple! Love does not divide life up like that. You say pleasure is good and pain is bad, so surely the spiritual life must bring more pleasure and banish all pain, right?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “You’d be given the power to see all things and then willingly become blind again to the ones you don’t like.

“I tell you, the divine path is less about healing pain completely and more about holding it compassionately.”

His small smile returns.

“On the divine path, you can see everything, so you see more of what you do not want to see. You see what hurts. You see what saddens you. You see what scares you. You see what angers you. You see what you want to change, fix, manipulate, and control. You see that which is hard to accept. That which is hard to welcome. The man Jesus said to me, ‘Now that you can see everything, learn how to love everything.’ Did they write that down where you come from?”

“No, they didn’t.”

“No, of course not,” he says, and there’s sincere merriment in it. “It’s bad for business.” He cackles.

“The divine path, as you call it, is not for the faint of heart,” I say. The list of things I have still not learned to love is long.

“No, it is not for the faint of heart,” he agrees. “But if you follow the path, it will eventually open your heart. To all of life. And that, young man, is heavenly.”

He turns his face upward again, toward the Hebrew hymn floating heavenward from the rooftop. Closes his eyes. Smiles widely. And cries freely.