I keep thinking about blind Bartimeus, and the other people, all damaged in one way or another, who reached out to Jesus in their weakness. I suppose someone has made a list of them, but anyone who goes to Mass or reads the New Testament very often can immediately think of several: the woman with the hemorrhage, the ten lepers of whom only one returned to give thanks for his healing, the crippled man who was told to take up his bed and walk.
It is a constant theme in the New Testament: that weakness is a form of strength, that poverty is a form of wealth. I think the reason for this, or one of the reasons, is that those who are in some way weak or poor are able to recognize the truth of their situation in a way that the powerful and rich are not. It seems to have been the thing that Nietzsche, with his admiration (to say the least) of power, hated most about Christianity, the thing that made him call it, contemptuously, a religion for women and slaves.
But weakness and poverty are the true condition of us all. One need not believe in God to recognize the fundamental weakness of every human being; all human strength is paltry in comparison to the physical forces of the world. Every source and form of human power—wealth, beauty, domination—is fragile at best and doomed by time. One who has those things finds it easy to believe that they are his by right and that he will always have them. But age and death will eventually take them all.
Better then, to understand the situation from the beginning. And those who know, like Bartimaeus, that we are damaged and weak and broken stand open to both God and despair. We may still choose wrongly, of course—poverty and weakness are certainly no guarantors of wisdom or virtue—but we make our choice in the face of reality, not illusion.
I’ve never been the sort of person who hears God speaking to him at every turn. You know the sort I mean: the sort who frequently says “The Lord laid it on my heart” to do or say something. There have been only two or three times when it seemed to me that God might have spoken directly to me. I didn’t hear a voice, but words were suddenly present in my mind, addressed to me as if they came from someone else else.
One of these was soon after I returned to the Christian faith after what I’ve come to think of as my lost years, between the ages of roughly eighteen and twenty-eight. They weren’t truly or entirely lost, and quite a few good things happened in that time, but I was lost, and I made a real mess of things. And when I came out of that period I was very conscious of my weakness, almost to the point of despair. One night I was praying, and the words came into my mind: I made you weak so that you would know where real strength comes from.
That was a comfort to me, though as time went on I’ve often forgotten it. I find it very difficult to glory in my weakness, as St. Paul said he did. I would rather be strong. I guess I still haven’t completely learned my lesson. Most of us, perhaps, really and fully grasp it only at the point of death.
Light On Dark Water 
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