Seeing With Our Hearts

Can you imagine blindness? Most of us think of blindness as the absence of sight, but blindness can take on so many other meanings. If we think of spiritual blindness, we might look at many things in life and begin to see that what is happening, or what has happened, is wrong. We often say, “Oh, now I see” when we come to understand something in a different light.

At other times, we say, “I never saw that coming” or we ask, “Why didn’t I see that when it was happening?” The readings this week are all about what is seen and what is not seen, light and dark, blindness and sight.

If we start today by reflecting on our own blindness, we have to ask ourselves, where do we not see evil? Are we blind to hatred that destroys the good name of another? Are we blind to the prejudices that populate our lives? Do we recognize domestic violence when it is happening around us? Do we see how we blame the victim or make judgments about the behavior of others? Do we hide behind language like “hate the sin but love the sinner”?

Do we have the courage to ask others to help us to see? At Mass this weekend, we have the opportunity to ask God to heal our blindness, to move us out of darkness to light. And on Monday night at 7 pm, come to listen to Miriam and Monica as they explore light and fire as symbols in our Lenten journey.

May the blindness of hatred, the darkness of war, and the gloom of greed be transformed by the Light of Christ. We want to see with our hearts. We want to see as Jesus sees. We want to see as God sees!

“Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the hearts.” May I choose to see the goodness in others, the world, and myself.

Living Water Poured Out on Us

The woman at the well is one of the most intriguing and powerful women figures in the Gospel. Although to a Jew she is a nobody (because she is a woman and a Samaritan), she engages Jesus in a lively and revealing dialogue. What do you think she thinks about Jesus? What does Jesus think of her? How is she transformed in this encounter?

When Jesus requests, “Give me a drink,” he expresses a need for her.  That need begins a conversation that satisfied her very deep thirst for God and for acceptance. After all, she came at noon, the hottest time of the day, so that she wouldn’t meet the women who shunned her and derided her. Jews considered Samaritans to be less than human and men did not speak to women in public.

But Jesus is different. Jesus gifts her with dialogue and presence. He not only talks to her, but he also appreciates her willingness to be vulnerable and accepts her as she is. Transformed by this experience of Jesus as “living water,” she runs back to the village, to people she tried to avoid and that avoided her, and her excitement at coming to know Jesus transforms them. They too come to believe that the Savior, the Lord, was among them.

One of many lessons for me in this story is that being vulnerable frees us to be honest with God, myself, and others. Ultimately, knowing Jesus quenches my deepest longing. Another lesson is acceptance of the stranger, the one who doesn’t fit, who isn’t like me. Jesus breaks the law again in talking to a woman, in public. Furthermore, he needs her to give him a drink. I am left with lots to think about regarding the role of some laws in my own life today. When would I be willing to break a law in order to save another?

Join us on Sunday, as our Elect and candidates express their own vulnerabilities by naming the transformation they seek in their lives.  Like them, ask that living water, the water of salvation quenches our thirst too! And then as disciples, by virtue of our own baptism, we too, run with gratitude to share God’s living water with all we meet.

Let Us See Christ As He Really Is

All the elements of a spiritual journey are found in the readings for this weekend. At St. Francis, we have begun our Lenten spiritual journey whole-heartedly, and, hopefully, we are all experiencing a bit of seeing Jesus as he really is.

As we explore the readings, we hear about Abram’s journey that takes him beyond the comfort zone of his home to a home yet unknown to him, one that he doesn’t live to see. He trusts in a promise made to him, and only his descendants experience the blessing as promised. In the reading from 2 Timothy, we hear of God giving us the strength to endure hardships, to live holy lives based on God’s design—God’s will for us—and on God’s grace, given to us in abundance. And then we experience the ultimate strategy session—Jesus meets Moses and Elijah on the mountain top. They represent the law and the prophets, and Jesus mediates both. They must all get on the same page! Jesus, the human, is transfigured, becomes the most brilliant light, and it’s like staring at the sun without sunglasses! It’s a vision of things to come—the kingdom.

James and John had accompanied Jesus to the mountain, and they heard God’s voice. “This is my Son. Listen to him!” Upon hearing this, they fell to the ground and were afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, and when they raised their eyes they saw Jesus alone. They saw Jesus as he really is. Immediately, they wanted to build tents and to stay there. But Jesus sent them forth. They had to come down the mountain and live in the kingdom!

Once we have listened and learned about Jesus, it’s our turn to tell others, to show others, and to live as Jesus lived. When we become afraid or feel alone, we remember the promise that we are never alone. When we are happy and excited, we want to praise God. In other words, we are called to be the light of Christ, to radiate and illuminate all that Jesus did on that mountain. It is clear that the work of God continues daily when we see Christ as he really is—when enemies are transformed into allies, when strangers become friends!

Transformation and conversion are everywhere! Let’s name it! How are we being changed? Where are we experiencing “transfiguration?”

P.S. There is a wonderful reflection on the Transfiguration by Diana Macalintil found on Facebook. Click here to read it.

Making God #1 in Our Lives

Turn our hearts around! Lent provides the universal church and each of us a good time for self-reflection and practices that lead to a change of heart, true conversion. In this week’s readings, we are reminded that soon after Jesus’ baptism, he went to the desert where he was tempted. And he resisted!  When you read the Gospel, or hear it proclaimed this weekend, pay close attention to the way Jesus responds to the devil, to the temptation to put self before God. How often do we do that?

Is God first in our lives? Above all else? What evidence do we have for that?

This Sunday we celebrate the Rite of Sending and the Rite of Election with our catechumens and candidates. Our adults, teens and children have been discerning their calls to conversion, to radical change in their hearts. Perhaps the questions they are reflecting on will spur us to return to making God #1 in our lives.

• What concrete evidence in your life demonstrates that you have listened to Go’s word and have been formed and transformed by it?
• In what way have you patterned your life on Jesus’ life in the Gospels? How have you changed?
• What evidence in your life and in your actions demonstrates that you have taken the word of God out into your world?
• What evidence in your life demonstrates that you are incorporated into the life of prayer and worship of the Catholic community?

Called to BE Providence

Do you think you worry about earthly things more than you should? Jesus says that we should trust God to care for us. How convinced are you?

Recently, my community, the Sisters of Divine Providence gathered to reflect on what we are experiencing as the call to be Providence. Sister Marie McCarthy provided some wonderful reflection pieces for us.

What does it mean to name God Providence? God provides everything we need. We love that about God. AND the mystery of Providence is even larger and more profound than this, because the mystery of Providence is incomplete without our response. Sister Marie tells us that

Providence, the Energy of Love, is the mystery of the ongoing, enduring interrelationship between the God who makes all things possible and us creatures, handiwork of the creative activity of Love—creatures made in the very image and likeness of Holy Mystery, creatures who are themselves creative.

Each of us then, by virtue of the relationship we have with God, has the ability, the choice to continue God’s Providence by becoming involved in creating new possibilities, new connections to all of life.  Sister Marie says:

The call to be Providence in our world is a call to engage actively in bringing about the transformation of the world….To be Providence is to trust, not in the false treasures of material possessions, better arms, and fleeting securities, but in the foolhardiness of casting aside these concerns for the sake of building a genuine human community, founded in justice and relying on Providence.

To be Providence is to find one’s treasure in that community of people who give themselves to radical hope. That hope, she says, is “a thoroughly engaged and courageous hope which faces the overwhelming evils and possibilities for destruction which surround us and yet persistently plans for, hopes in, and builds towards that future which God desires.”

We discover what God desires for us, what God provides as new opportunities to serve our brothers and sisters when we gather as a community of radical hope and we search for ways to be Providence for our world. See you on Sunday to explore together!