So we have this beautifully constructed end piece of this majestic Gospel with Jesus performing a miracle of abundance and opening the disciples' eyes to what is right there for them. Jesus is saying to them, "Hey my silly friends, look over here, all you could ever want is right over here, turn and look!" They do look and they find abundance. Jesus continues to care for them by feeding them, by nourishing them around a makeshift table in the sand. Jesus then, after curing their blindness and nourishing them, instructs them that they must now do something: feed, tend, feed. Jesus sends them forth to do the work he has started. There is an important link here to what we are about to do around our communal table. We are about to be nourished in our eucharistic meal and we are going to be sent forth to do God's work.

Yet, before we are nourished, before we are sent forth, the Gospel is asking us to ponder the question, to what are we blind. What are we focusing on that is getting in the way of our seeing what is right there next to us? We are asked to contemplate a difficult and challenging question this week. And there is no universal answer. Each of us individually, in our own lives, in our own ways, has to find an answer.

After the news of this past week, this question becomes even more difficult, sharper. The 32 individuals murdered last Monday morning at Virginia Tech raises the stakes on this question: to what was our society blind in regard to the individual who perpetrated these heinous crimes. All over the news media, easy answers are being sought and given. I do not think the answers are that easy or that direct. Perhaps the easy answers, the quick fix to the societal problems this incident illuminates, are the things we are focused on, where no fish are being caught. Would Jesus be saying: "Hey folks, turn around, look on the other side of the boat, the answers are on that side, in abundance." Is it taking a wider view of the society and social structures that helped turn an obviously disturbed individual into something beyond monstrous? I do not know.  

There was further difficult news this week, compounding my response to this Gospel. In Iraq, 82 people were killed in an open air market by one car bomb, the largest car bombing ever. Scores more injured, maimed, forever changed. And that was just one day in Iraq. Whatever your view is on this war, very few people can say that things are getting better, or that the answers are easy, simple, or that there is a quick fix. To what are we blind? Are we focused on the wrong side of the boat, when there may be an answer on the other side? I do not know.

Whether we are looking at the society around us, at the war, at the rampant poverty and illness in the world, AIDS and starvation in Africa, ecological devastation to the world's rain forests, economic slavery forced upon individuals from underdeveloped nations, there are no easy answers or quick fixes. Trying for those is being focused on the wrong side of the boat.