"... I am the light of the world." - John 9:5

St. Augustine wrote of our lesson: "This blind man stands for the human race ... if the blindness is infidelity, then the illumination is faith." Surely we need the illumination of Christian faith today. Ours is one of those epochs of which it may be said, as Shakespeare said of Romeo, "affliction is enamoured of thy parts ... and thou art wedded to calamity."

Worse still, we seem bereft of a vision to sustain us. "Without a vision, the people perish," declares the biblical proverb. It seemed to T. S. Eliot on the eve of World War II that the people were perishing because they had no vision:

They all go into the dark ...

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and rulers,

Distingu…