By Rev. Brian Jensen

By now, I suspect, most of us are aware of the story of John Newton, author of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” He wrote the hymn after he became an Anglican clergyman, but before that he was the captain of a slave trading ship. Although he received some early religious instruction from his mother, who died when he was 6, he had given up any serious religious conviction by the time he reached adulthood. Then one night, as he attempted to steer his ship through a particularly violent storm, he experienced what he later referred to as his “great deliverance.”

He recorded in his journal that when all seemed lost and he was convinced the ship was about to sink, he cried out, “Lord, have mercy upon us!” Later, he reflected on what he had said and began to believe he had actually encountered God in that storm. Perhaps that storm was the source of verse three of his famous hymn:

Through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come;

’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.

May 10, 1748, was the day of John Newton’s “great deliverance.” Yet John Newton continued to pilot slave trading ships, although he did come to treat the slaves on his ships a little bit better. Some years later he had a stroke and in the aftermath of that, he again had a profound encounter with God. It was then that he said he felt truly at peace with God for the first time in his life. Yet even then, he continued to invest financially in the slave trading business. He finally became an abolitionist much later in life. Then he apologized for a confession that, as he put it, “comes too late, and will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I once was an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” Perhaps that confession was the source of verse one of “Amazing Grace”:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

There is more than one kind of blindness. Of course, there is what we call physical blindness. Yet perhaps there is also a kind of blindness we might call spiritual blindness. John Newton was not healed of physical blindness. John Newton was healed of spiritual blindness.

Jesus addressed the subject of blindness in the gospel according to Luke. He came to Nazareth — his own home town — and entered the synagogue on the Sabbath. As he stood up to read, he was handed a scroll from the book of Isaiah. Jesus read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Much can be said about the aforementioned passage, but I want to focus on the recovery of sight to the blind. How does Jesus restore sight to the blind? More specifically, how does Jesus heal spiritual blindness?

Spiritual blindness occurs when we suffer from what a fourth century monastic scholar named Evagrius called the eight deadly thoughts. Two centuries later, Gregory the Great revised the concept of the eight deadly thoughts and called them the seven deadly sins, but for our purposes, we’ll stick with the eight deadly thoughts. Spiritual blindness occurs when we suffer from the eight deadly thoughts. What are the eight deadly thoughts? They are: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, accidia, vainglory and pride. I don’t have the space to explain all of them here. I invite you to look them up for yourselves.

What we need is Christian apatheia. Apatheia refers to a state of mind where one is free from emotional disturbance. When we attain the state of Christian apatheia we are no longer disturbed by the eight deadly thoughts. We are free to love God with all our heart and with all our strength and with all our soul and with all our mind. And, we are free to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The ancient spiritual masters believed that we reached such a state through what they called ascetical practices. Ancient ascetical practices included things like prayer, fasting, spiritual study and almsgiving. As Diogenes Allen put it in his book, “Spiritual Theology,” “As long as our attention is distracted because we ourselves are divided in our wishes, wants, desires and hopes, we cannot attend to the word of God.” In other words, our spiritual blindness will continue — we will always fall short of the goal of Christian apatheia — as long as we remain distracted by the things of this world. We need to grow closer to God by way of ascetical practices.

As we grow closer to God, we will find our spiritual blindness going away. It won’t likely happen overnight. Recall, for example, how long it took John Newton to see the error of his ways. It won’t likely happen overnight, but you will find yourself being mysteriously drawn closer to God. You will find your spiritual blindness gradually fading away. You may even find yourself encountering Christian apatheia as the things that once seemed to matter so much suddenly don’t seem to matter any more.



Jensen is pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Meadville.