Viewpoint and Vision by Fran Salone-Pelletier

Readings: Isaiah 6:1-2, 3-8; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

Seeing is believing. How often have we heard or voiced that cliché and shuddered with its triteness? More concerned with viewing than vision, too many of us focus on the process and miss the person.

Applied to our concept of Christianity, the difficulty becomes all too clear. Religion becomes salvation. Attending liturgical services is equated with conversion. Doctrines, dogmas, and decrees exceed divinity. The church becomes an end rather than a means—and God is diminished, if not lost, in the tumult of conflicting thoughts and feelings. When we continue our frenetic activity, we are like the apostles in the Lucan gospel, hard at work but catching nothing. Frustration becomes futility. Before long, we disembark from laborious efforts, wash our nets, and give up! Seeing nothing accomplished means believing that nothing can be achieved.

All three readings today remind us that seeing is not necessarily sight; viewing is not always vision. Isaiah thinks he sees everything with a grand lucidity. “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isa 6:5-6) “Seeing” here leads to his conviction that doom, disaster, and impending death await him. Seeing dissolves into blinding terror—until God’s angel touches him, purging stultifying fear and replacing it with fiery sight.

Isaiah’s sight affords him new vision and a renewed sense of God’s presence. Where once the inevitability of punishment loomed large, there is now an enthusiastic impulsion to serve. Energizing life replaces debilitating doom. God, person and presence, becomes overwhelmingly important. Process achieves its proportional status.

Paul remembered Isaiah’s message, inscribing it in his heart while encouraging the Corinthians to do the same. For him, the sight of Jesus was the sole compelling force, the foundation of his conversion. Vision alone was sufficient impetus to believe, preach, evangelize, receive, and accept one’s own worth—and transform activity into salvific action.

No less dramatic is Peter’s response. Just as Isaiah and Paul, he also feels sinfully unworthy of God’s presence. After lowering his nets again and gaining sight of the abundant catch where there had been only emptiness, Peter falls at Jesus’s knees, proclaiming, “Go away, Lord. I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). His confession prompts conversion. Peter leaves everything to become a follower.

Each man experienced God’s person and presence differently. Each discovered that truth is revealed when vision is allowed to accompany and give depth to viewing. Each was amazed to learn that seeing may not always be believing, but insight brightens belief and enlivens creeds.

Jesus was a man of sight and insight. He was a person whose mission was to give sight to the blind. Revelation was both means and end. Jesus uncovered sinfulness and unveiled injustice. He saw the good in people labeled, denounced, and renounced by others as evil. Tax collectors were his hosts, prostitutes his dinner guests. Samaritans found solace in his company. Women and children were welcomed and embraced. Ordinary fishermen found extraordinary meaning in their work. Fright, confusion, unworthiness disappeared as sight replaced seeing and viewing gave way to vision.

Those made weary by codes and creeds that constrained them to narrow understandings of God were given a new, creative acuity. God’s call expanded their limited viewpoints. They were empowered to see, to hear, to act with “God-sight.” Faith was no longer fatiguing. It was fascinatingly fearsome.

These are not the wonders of an age long past. They are our own everyday experiences, when we have sight to brighten our belief and enliven our creeds. Just as happened with Isaiah, so may our sight of God embolden us to cry out, “Here I am; send me!” 

In the same way that Peter and the others surrendered their viewpoint to Jesus’s vision, lowering their nets into waters that had previously yielded no fish, so will we find abundance where paucity had prevailed. We will have both strength and vision to leave the shallow places of humdrum existence, the safe harbors of comfort and ease. The power is ours to leave behind any discouragement that comes from laboring with no apparent results. We can relinquish the frustration born of futile attempts to convince or encourage change in others. We can dismiss the fatigue that is the mark of the psychically weary. We can leave it all, not to escape but to confront the lukewarmness marring our own lives. Freed, we can put out into deep water.

There is no need to fear the depths or the God we find in them. There is promise that much more will be ours than we could ever hope to anticipate. The exorbitance will be so great that we will need to signal for assistance from our mates in other boats. They will come to us, and together we will fill our lives to the point that we nearly sink from the enormity of our sight, our “catch.”

Never need we fear the call of generosity. Never fear the prodigious love that wells up, impelling us to be more godly. Do not be afraid of taking time, making time, giving time in God’s service. Do not fear making huge mistakes. Know, instead, what Helen Keller believed: “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is not safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Daring adventurers, our only authentic response is “Send me!” It is the sole vocation of those who know that seeing is not always believing. It is the cry of a people whose sight brightens belief and enlivens creed.

Here I am, Lord. Send me. ♦

Prayer

Dear God, I have heard it said the sea is large and my boat is small. Sometimes that is exactly the way I feel. My problems and difficulties overwhelm me and I think I am going to capsize and drown. Help me to have the vision to believe even when I cannot see and the insight to see and truly believe. Be with me in powerful ways when I am discouraged and frustrated, when I feel useless and ineffective. Show me what catch I need to seek and what nets to use. Be my fisher God who lives in the boat of my life. Amen.

Fran Salone-Pelletier holds a master’s degree in theology. She is the author of a trilogy of scriptural meditations, Awakening to God: The Sunday Readings in Our Lives, in which a version of this reflection originally appeared. She is also a religious educator, retreat leader, lecturer, and grandmother of four. Reach her at hope5@atmc.net.