Keep your Vision on the whole picture to fully live this Lent

Image by marvinbla on Pixabay.

By Sister Michele Morek, OSU

I was re-reading an account of Saint Angela Merici’s childhood vision that shaped her Company and our Ursuline Community. It was a Vision of young women and angels going up and down a ladder between heaven and earth.

But there is Vision and there is vision. Angela had to keep the eyes of her heart open and her small- “v” vision sharp for about 40 more years before she fully understood what that Vision meant for her and the women who followed her.

It reminded me of my mother’s description of her hikes in the New Mexico mountains with a friend who was an avid birdwatcher. My mother’s areas of interest were closer to the ground – rocks, fossils, and wildflowers. She said the two of them could have walked off a cliff or into a bear, what with Mom looking down and her friend looking up …

They were both looking intently but did not have a sense of the whole; they were using their vision on the details, but did not have a Vision of the whole picture. Like the old saying, “you couldn’t see the forest for the trees,” they could not see the forest (or the path) for the birds and rocks. They were not focused on the Whole, on the Way, on the Vision.

It helps to have Vision, so we won’t focus entirely on the daily details, or be distracted by every shiny new object along our path.