Seeking the Face of Christ: Part I—The Plea of Bartimaeus by Ged Ayotte

The most vital question Jesus ever asks each of us, I think, is the one he posed to Bartimaeus in the 10th chapter of Mark’s gospel. It is a vital question in part because it implies that we must recognize the essential and fundamental truth expressed in Jesus telling us that apart from him, we can do nothing (John 15:5). Seeing Bartimaeus in the intimacy of his individuality, although surrounded by a crowd, Jesus invites the blind man forward and asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” Bartimaeus places before him the plea which, whether we know it or not, lies as a longing deep in the heart of each of us: “Teacher, let me see.” Release me from my blindness.

All of us know, as the Buddha himself knew, that it is crucial that we learn to “be awake.” Like the apostles at Gethsemane on the darkest and holiest of Thursday evenings, Jesus asks us to stay awake with him as we live out our lives.

But we are so often blind and asleep, and if ever there was a time for us to awaken and stand, it is now. And the first step in confronting “the enemy” that would stand in the way of the unfolding of God’s loving reign, to keep us anaesthetized and asleep, is to recognize and name him.

It can be bewildering how “good people”—including self-identified “Christian traditionalists”—can find themselves deeply committed to social and political movements which are so clearly infected by policies and practices that are inherently evil. Like countless others, I’ve grappled with this for many years and have found three “lenses” which have helped me to reflect on the ways in which we are asleep and how our Christ desires to awaken and inspire us. This reflection might seem to focus on my own, the Roman Catholic Church, who has shown me the face of God and to whom I owe my very life, but today’s epidemic has now swept into its path every church, every religion, every nation. And it is in the naming of the enemy—hatred, darkness, injustice, condemnation of one another—where we will find the hope to overcome him in building God’s reign of love.

The first “lens” comes from St. Ignatius of Loyola, when he writes about “discernment of spirits.” He has a vital insight regarding how “the evil spirit disguises himself as an angel of light.” I think of this when I read of certain evangelical Christians, Christian nationalists, and even Conferences of Catholic Bishops in the US and Canada. Ethics 101 clearly teaches that the most difficult moral challenges with which we can be confronted in life involve times when we are faced with two or more competing values. But as an old teacher, Fr. Gerard Broccolo, once wrote, holiness doesn’t lie in the futile effort to achieve perfection and the ideal, but in persevering in the struggle; it lies in authentic fidelity to the struggle itself, to “love as Christ loves us.” We discern where the Spirit is leading us moment by moment, often “to places where we would rather not go”—but our faith and our longing to serve the people of God in the light of the first and second covenants of our Judeo-Christian Scriptures necessitates our going there.

When values inevitably compete, synodality rightly calls us to come together and prayerfully discern where God is leading us; to make often difficult choices regarding the ground on which we are called to stand; and then to speak out of an informed conscience with courage, conviction, and respect for the other as effectively as we possibly can, moved by an earnest longing to be instruments of God’s love and peace and justice. There’s holiness here: Christ’s face is visible in such a people. And to cope with the ambiguity of holding multiple painfully conflicting values at the same time, all in the name of greater compassion and justice for greater numbers of people: in this is real faith. Not to avoid inevitable paradox, but, as Kierkegaard concluded within his own struggles, to leap in faith and live into the paradox. This faith requires courage and risk.

Sadly, “Christian traditionalists” often seem to follow the path of least resistance, to “keep it simple” by identifying a single moral issue as towering over all the rest, and then consign the rest into a kind of obscurity. Abortion is clearly the “simplest” issue for this, because it allows one to preach and judge, while only the woman (and those close to her) are required to live with the consequences of that judgment. Meanwhile, one takes comfort in the fact that one has defended valiantly the “single principle” that requires defending: the sanctity of the life of the unborn child—a sanctity which, it needs to be stated, is very real indeed.

I can speak to this issue on a personal level. My wife’s miscarriage some 46 years ago while we were on a vacation 2,500 miles from our home, as well as the confusion and grieving that subsequently ensued, took the truth of this sanctity of life from the academic and theoretical into the real. In the light of day the following morning, when I returned to the remote desert place where my wife was transferred from a station wagon to an ambulance, I quietly searched for any “tissue” remains of our unborn child that might have remained on the side of the road and, of course, treated this with the loving respect which was its due. There is no detached theology here, only the Divine Spirit indwelling and beckoning faithfully. Some theologians will never know that reality in quite the same way, though undoubtedly many do; women who are theologians, in particular, know this, and from them we tend to get a very different kind of teaching than has been offered as part of the formative curricula in our seminaries.

But the life of our unborn child, sacred though it is, was in God’s eyes no more sacred than that of the many men and women whom I have met in prison ministry; nor more sacred than the living and breathing children and families suffering in torment in Gaza today, and their Israeli cousins who have suffered at the hands of Hamas—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and atheist alike; nor more sacred than today’s lepers, trans people born into an identity struggle the likes of which I cannot imagine.

When abortion is viewed as having some kind of exclusive primacy, one can then ignore these cries, as well as the cries of children torn from the arms of their parents as they attempt to escape poverty and persecution, or the cries of a pregnant 16-year-old rape victim and her family. One can blindly embrace the obvious lies of self-proclaimed “pro-life” politicians who I am utterly convinced care no more for the life of the unborn than they do for Ukrainian citizens butchered in the most recent Russian assault; politicians who wish to place on the backs of the people an otherwise death-dealing economic and social system devoid of justice and compassion, a system in point-by-point opposition to the Beatitudes and the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 25.

When abortion is viewed as having some kind of exclusive primacy, we can detach ourselves from the abject horror of the event and offer a remote blessing as the state straps a man or woman (typically the end victim of intergenerational poverty and/or mental disorder) to a modern gurney-crucifix and injects them with fatal toxins—the convicted person also being, of course, one whose life, whose being, is also sacred. One can demean and blaspheme the Blessed Sacrament itself in order to manipulate one’s own political ends, or deny the people of God an effective pathway to pastoral and sacramental ministry provided by a vast body of theologically and spiritually formed women eager to offer themselves for their care. The list is as endless as it is abhorrent.

And what is the secondary priority all too often expressed as our ecclesiastical response to a humanity and a created world urgently crying out for mercy and healing justice? The Latin Mass! And the Liturgiam Authenticam, if required to tolerate the vernacular.

How can we become so blind? The gates are thus opened wide to a legion of “angels of darkness disguised as angels of light” and the welcome mat placed in full view. And Screwtape grins! ♦

Ged Ayotte is grateful for almost 80 years formed by the sacramental life of the church. He has served as a prison chaplain and a therapist (private practice), and continues to offer Ignatian spiritual direction. Decades of service in an archdiocesan advisory role has him continuing to accompany victim/survivors of clergy sexual abuse in their search for healing and wholeness. Part II of this essay will appear in a subsequent edition of Today’s American Catholic.

Image: Christ Acheiropoietos (“Made without Hands”), Novgorod icon, Assumption Cathedral, Moscow, 12th c.