Healing the Eyes of the Heart: Developing Sacramental Vision

‘We Do Not See Rightly’

My all-time favorite movie is a somewhat obscure Netflix original kid’s movie, ‘The Little Prince’, based off the kid’s book written in 1943 in French by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In such simple, poetic words and imagery it conveys profound truths; every time I watch it I’m struck by new layers of meaning.

One of the lines reads “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Although knowledge of Saint-Exupéry’s personal devotion or adherence to a specific faith is somewhat vague, his line is pretty spot on with a Catholic understanding of spiritual theology and sacramentality.

The Theology of the Body Institute recently published a book, God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, by Karol Wojtyla. It recovers an original retreat for artists given by Wojtyla before he became Pope John Paul II, coupled with reflections and commentary on the connections between the themes of beauty and the Theology of the Body.

In it, Christopher West expounds on the teachings expressed by Wojtyla: that due to original sin, we do not see rightly. We are blinded to the divine plan for human life. (God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, Karol Wojtyla, P. 75)

The Eyes of the Heart

Our blindness comes from a certain disconnect between what we perceive in our minds and the core of our being, our ‘heart’, wherein God dwells as a result of baptism. Instead of hearing the voice of God in our hearts, we hear what we perceive on a surface level. Instead of seeing and understanding with the eyes of faith, we see from whatever framework has formed in our minds due to our circumstances. Channels of the brain are formed in accordance with what we see, hear, and repeat as true to ourselves. We build up a system of beliefs based on our ‘vision’ of how the world is. Habitually we will return to these patterns of thought even though we may intellectually understand our faulty thinking. For example I may understand on a knowledge level that God is with me in all things, yet in a moment of hardship I return to a pattern of thinking “God isn’t with me and I must find my own way out of my circumstance.”

To this the scriptures say “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). And this renewal must take place from the inside out, not by our own strength, not by willing ourselves to see rightly. It must be by a humble return to God, a vulnerability before him, allowing him to broaden and deepen our vision as he illumines the truth in the midst of our circumstances.

Channels of Grace

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives this definition of grace: “Grace is a participation in the life of God” (CCC. 1997).

This means that avenues of grace are places we actually experience the life of God: Prayer, the Sacraments, and sacramentals. These are given to us as sure places we can encounter him, and EXPERIENCE his life. And what does this encounter really do? Well, in a word, everything! An encounter with God is an encounter with truth itself, beauty itself, goodness itself. In beholding God we behold a true vision, we ‘see rightly’. And the more continually we return to this true vision, the more our minds are aligned to it, our sight is healed, and we are free to operate from our core wherein God dwells without our brain’s patterns holding us captive. This is when outward transformation happens (over time of course, and by the grace of God)- a person takes on the life of Christ and becomes a living icon. The person’s will becomes one with Christ’s will and the Father’s will. He becomes Christ’s vessel of grace, a new living witness, a sacramental, a ‘sign’ of what the life of God looks like. This is the calling for each of us, an invitation to sanctity, total transformation from the inside out.

I could ramble about this for a while, I mean it’s just jaw-dropping when you stop and think about it, nothing less than the point of our existence! But in the interest of succinct-ness I’ll save the rambles for other blogs and move to one last point:

Surrounding ourselves in truth, beauty, goodness

In this journey of transformation, what is there to do but surround ourselves by grace?! Christ is the Good Shephard who will lead us by the hand, for he knows our hearts better than we know ourselves. He will unfold the layers over our hearts steadily and in perfect timing, with just the right circumstances tailored to our needs. We must simply turn to him, seek him. He is always there, always waiting, knocking, ready for that encounter.

And how shall we turn to him? RUN to sources of grace. Even when we don’t see the results we want immediately we can always trust God is at work in us, and isn’t it enough to be in his presence? The clearest sources of grace are prayer and the sacraments. Pray with infallible truth, sit with the scriptures, read and learn about the traditions of the Church.

Secondly there are millions of channels of grace all around us in ‘sacramentals’. All things bearing truth, beauty, and goodness - signs of the eternal all around us, stamped into creation. If we really want to cooperate with the truth that grace presents to us, we must actively counter the unhelpful patterns of thinking in our minds - the direct result of the information we feed ourselves through our senses. If we’re surrounded by negativity, ugliness, lies or even partial-truths, these will feed into our thought patterns and become the tools of the enemy in a war over our perception of reality. Naturally, surrounding ourselves with good things provides access points for God to reach us, and through the discipline of what we allow to enter our minds we will develop what Christopher West refers to as ‘sacramental vision’ (God is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art, Karol Wojtyla, P. 190), where by God’s grace we begin to perceive his presence all around us. He “Opens the eyes of the blind!” (Psalm 146:8).

A Branch Communicates

A tree branch- a line. A set of lines.

Lines communicate.

Frenzied lines, calm lines, hyper lines, yawning lines, worried lines, dignified lines…can you picture them? Can you draw them? Can you find them in nature?

I love branches, the lines and shapes they make. I love what they communicate- many truths written all around us.

Within the art you find the artist- he brings himself to what he makes, there is none but he who could make what he did, with all his life experience poured out through those lines.

Someone drew those lines in the branches-poured himself out- what can we know of him?

Embracing the Call of an Artist

Hello all! I’m in a new season of life, recently ending 4 years of work with SPO as an admin missionary, and now entering a season of full-time motherhood.

During this new season I’m also cultivating a small art business and ministry, which in some ways feels like I’m stepping into my “dream job”, even if in just a part-time capacity. Here on this website, and particularly as of the writing of this blog, you’ll find the humble beginnings of an artist trying to make sense of many dreams and visions and discern what is meant to be embraced and cultivated in this particular season.

I’ve wanted this moment for a long time, and in the couple years leading up to this transition and still now as I begin to enter in, I’ve done a lot of reflecting on the dichotomy between the general understanding of a “dream job”, even in the Christian sense of being called to “do” or “be” something with one’s life, and another understanding which I’ve come to consider “living out of a calling”. In the previous sense, you arrive one day at your “calling” and start living out of it at that moment, when all the pieces line up, and after much hard work leading up to it. That’s how I used to understand my calling as an artist, and honestly how I feel tempted to think about it all the time. In that mindset, one can imagine being fulfilled by one’s work, and in the moment they don’t feel satisfied they can buckle down and work hard, telling themselves they just haven’t “arrived” yet.

BUT, allow me to share with you a taste of the other sense, and how it comes with absolute freedom to embrace your calling, your unique design and the talents God’s given you, while going through every season of life in its good time, fulfilled whether or not in any season the “dream” comes to full fruition.

(side note - I’m using the words “dream” and “call” here somewhat interchangeably, which comes with the presumption that the “dream” has been submitted and discerned. Our deepest desires and dreams will be fulfilled in God (though most certainly in a deeper and more fulfilling way than we’ve dared to hope/are capable of comprehending - for which reason we must consider our dreams shallow and ask God to reveal the deeper need and desire we have.) Because of the shallowness, we ought not expect every hope and desire we have be answered in the initial way we thought of it, but with much prayer and aligning our hearts with the promises of God, we can expect our desires and dreams to be refined into real tangible things that are noble of pursuit. At this stage, a “call” in your life may well present itself as a dream or desire, because your deepest desire is for the Lord. What he invites you too will ignite your heart and be life-giving, a stepping stone on your journey towards him.)

But back to the main point -

In the second sense, “living out of a calling”, your call unfolds throughout your life, taking on different forms, drawing out different talents and skills, challenging you and growing you in different ways. Perhaps at one point you’ll find yourself embodying the call really obviously or practically - as in a career surrounding it. At other times you may have very little time to put whatever it is into practice, but it still captivates your heart and mind and is an important part of you, and you live it out in many small ways. The focus becomes not the call, but the pursuit of God and the transformation of your life into his image. That is the universal calling, to become the ‘Imago Dei’. In different seasons of my life I’ve seen parts of my personality grow and fade, different skills brought to the forefront, different lessons learned, different weaknesses exposed. I look back on each season with gratitude, not because each season has been enjoyable. Rather I look back with a deeper joy and sense of peace because I can see God's hand in each circumstance and receive it as a gift.

Life is the journey by which God makes of us a masterpiece, transforming us into his own image. And he places us right where we need to be for that transformation to happen, its simply up to us to embrace that time and the grace he gives in it.

It’s been most freeing to “live out of my calling”. You see, I have a theory that we sometimes take a look at our desires and talents and associate them with a very specific way of life so that those things can be explicitly lived out. For myself, I realized in college that certain passions of mine, such as beauty’s evangelistic potential, coupled with my talent for drawing and painting, along with other personality traits that make me vision-driven and entrepreneurial, all just seemed to point to an art career. Once I realized that, it was hard to separate the things that make me uniquely me from my idea of how that could practically play out. But by submitting that practical vision of an art career, and allowing God to place me in different circumstances in my life, I’ve been able to see how he continually both pours into me through those areas of my life, and gives me places to pour out through them, what a gift! By trusting him with our circumstances we’ll find we have many opportunities where we can pour out in way that gives life to the world and reciprocally fills us with the life of God.

I’m eager for this new season, and grateful for the practical ways I can embrace the desire to be an artist. But I’m even more grateful in advance for whatever work he’s up to in my life, and through my life. It all leads me back to a sense of deep wonder at the ways of God and his love for us. In all circumstances then, let us give thanks! (1 Thess. 5:18).