Lent Week 4

This Week's Wednesday Word

"Siloam" by Lisle Gwynn Garrity
Used with permission
A Santified Art | sanctifiedart.org
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The beauty and challenge of this story is that Jesus doesn’t heal alone. He invites the man to co-create with him, to be an active participant in his own renewal.
There is no quick fix. Jesus doesn’t grant him sight through a profession of faith or a tap on the shoulder. Instead, the man enters the messy wilderness of healing by enduring three stages of blindness—by birth, by mud, then by water—before he opens his eyes to the world of color and light.
He must go deeper into his own personal wilderness—away from his healer, away from his accepted and familiar place outside the city. He must risk public shaming and social scrutiny in order to go into the city center—where he is both not allowed and yet sent—and submerge himself to a quick death of his old life, a death of
his senses, a death of what was once all too familiar and all too hard.
When I place myself in the man’s shoes, I imagine myself receiving Jesus’ command to go—to go beyond what is familiar into territory unknown; to be an active participant in my own continual healing and transformation; to surrender myself to a death of sorts, one that forces me to submerge into God’s murky and living waters so I can once again be reborn and awaken to the world with new eyes.
In this image, the pool of Siloam surrounds and lures the man, like baptismal waters claiming his place in the family of things.