Quick Summary:

In the novel, ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, we meet Marie-Laure, a girl born in Paris in the years before WW2, who loses her sight completely by age 6. Her father, a locksmith at the Paris Natural History Museum, anchors her world by crafting an exquisitely detailed scale-model of their neighborhood; a model she memorizes with her fingers. Each year, for her birthday, he crafts increasingly intricate puzzle boxes to further develop and test her skills. All this is prelude to the day he knows will come, when Marie will be forced by circumstances to negotiate the tumultuous world on her own.

But Marie-Laure is not the only protagonist in Anthony Doerr’s novel. The other main character is Werner, a German orphan whose gift for working with radios makes him a valuable commodity to the Third Reich.

Doerr constructs this fascinating and complex tale by flipping back and forth between these two characters, unlocking the story piece by piece, like one of the father’s intricate puzzle boxes.

Our texts today are about seeing and not seeing, sight and insight; and what it means to live in relationship to the light.
John 9 is a tale in which a man born blind receives new sight at the hand of Jesus, and this provokes confusion from his neighbors, opposition from the religious leaders, distance from his parents, and, at last, brings him eyeball to eyeball with the one who had given him sight.

Like the Anthony Doerr story, there our layers of meaning, carefully wrought details, and a structure that finds us circling back again and again. And all the while as the story unfolds, we watch both the sight and the insight of the man born blind grow, while other characters maintain their blindness. This rich story, like so many in John’s gospel, gives us so much to unpack. Today I’d like to focus on just a few things...