You have probably heard the story about the man who decided he wanted a parrot, so he went and found one on the internet, drove off and brought him home. But it turned out to be a horrible parrot, it was dirty, pecked its cage to pieces, destroyed furniture in the apartment, and worst of all, yes, it could talk, but all it said were the most horrible profanities, and when the owner had company over, it was even worse, shrieking the most awful things you’ve ever heard. And one night after an episode like that, the man grabbed the parrot off its perch, opened the freezer, shoved the parrot inside and slammed the door. He went away for about a half hour. But then his conscience bothered him and he went back and took out the parrot. The parrot shook its wings, scattering ice all over the floor, and said, “Sir, I must tell you that I regret my prior behavior. I will reform my ways, and I will never again utter such vile things as you have heard from me in the past.” The man was almost too surprised to talk, but he said, “Well, that’s great to hear, thank you.” The bird said, “Sir, may I ask you just one question?” The man said, “Of course.” The bird said, “What did the chicken do wrong?”
I would love to tell you that this story has a great moral lesson, but it really only has one image that I’d like you to think about: The sudden recognition the parrot has in that freezer, because all of a sudden his life is put before him in a new way. Inside the freezer, all of a sudden, he sees. It’s frightening, but he definitely sees.
This might seem to be a strange introduction to some thoughts about prayer, or maybe not so much about prayer as about what is worth praying for. Because the question today is: What do you pray for? If we pray at all, I imagine we end up praying for all kinds of things, we pray for people to get better from their illnesses, we pray to be able to get through some particularly awful stretch, we pray to do well on a test, we pray that our kids will be OK. But the message of today’s gospel is that we often don’t ask for something we need just as much as those other things: We need to ask to be able to see.
Today’s gospel is just one among several where Jesus heals a blind man. The blind man wants to see, and that’s understandable, if you were blind, that is something that you might want before anything else. But in a gospel like this, we are supposed to also remember all those other gospels where Jesus talks about being blind to people who aren’t blind, who think they are seeing just fine, except, of course, they can’t see. We think about the Pharisees, setting high standards for other people but hard hearted themselves, we think about rich people who long ago stopped seeing the poor. They are the ones who need to see, but they never ask to be able to. Here, today, someone finally asks Jesus what Jesus wants to hear from everyone, “Master, I want to see.”
Do we want to see? Maybe. But if we’re honest, we have to say sometimes yes, sometimes no. Like the parrot, like Bartimaeus, the gift of sight is liable to change you.
I had a friend who was once watching the 11 o’clock news, and it was a night filled with the kind of stories you usually see there, fires, and the usual urban problems, and there came a story about a small child inside an apartment who had been killed by a random bullet coming in from some neighborhood conflict outside. And it all was washing vaguely over my friend the way it usually would for all of us, until the film on the news showed the inside of the apartment where the child was killed, and on the floor there was one of those little plastic tricycles. Nothing much unusual there either, except my friend suddenly saw that on the floor in his own house, right next to the television, was the identical tricycle. Suddenly, he saw an indelible image that told him that those kids who get killed in Newark or even in Baghdad, are connected to us, there is a family relationship that is apparent to God but not, usually, apparent to us.
You’d see children a little differently after an experience like that, you can’t act like those other children are off in some different universe, not a concern of yours. For a moment, you see the world the way God sees it. Seeing can be disturbing like that, we might see being poor differently, we might see the earth differently, feel more responsible for its future, or we might feel nudged in a direction we don’t feel ready to go, just because all of a sudden we saw a glint of something that told us that we’d been blind to what was right next to us. Sight can be like that.
But God’s sight is also the force that can make us free, we might be given the gift of finally recognizing our real vocation in life when it had been hidden from our sight, we might be given the gifts of suddenly seeing the future filled with promise and love when we stopped seeing it that way long ago. All those kinds of sight come from God as well, God wants us to see everything, all we have to do is want God to open our eyes.
Do you want to ask for it, no matter what might happen? We have to want it the same way Bartimeaus wanted it in today’s gospel – we have to want to see our lives and the world around us as clearly as God is able to help us do it. Being suddenly able to see makes us suddenly able to change. The next time you pray, be courageous, and ask to see something you have never seen clearly before.