Torch

Things Invisible

“In short, through us and with us and in us, by our words and actions, the invisible and eternal Spirit makes the invisible known again”

Torch

The Face of God

“Before ever we speak a word, we should be an expression of the Word made flesh in how we look at people with mercy and compassion”

A Catholic Moment

Perceptions and Perspectives

“Lord, keep coming. Keep coming through me. Keep coming through your church. Help us to bring healing and joy”

Torch

Seeing and Saying

“Seeing is no simple matter. We don’t always see what is to be seen. We don’t always understand what we see, to the point where we don’t see it at all. Good and clear vision requires good and clear speech. Unlike God, not everything we say is true.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

“What moments of mutuality there must have been between Jesus and Zacchaeus in that pause! Seeing and being seen invites relationally, response and responsibility.”

A Catholic Moment

Looking Over God’s Shoulder

“God’s view includes looking over our shoulder and loving us enough to see what we see. God meets us there. But then, God invites us to look over his shoulder and see what he sees—TO GO WITH HIM WHERE HE GOES.”

A Catholic Moment

The God of Restoration

“But our God has not ceased to cross our way. He is not yet done with us. At the appointed time he will, he will surely come to meet us on the road where we are lying wretched and seeking for aid.”

The Sacred Page

20/20 Vision

“Lord, help us to see our vocations, help us to see what you would have us do, and help us to see in every human being someone worthy of love, that no one would be to us an “overlookable” or “throw-away” human”

Torch

Seeing the Need for Salvation

“When Christ gives Bartimaeus his sight, he doesn’t endow him with a unique superpower, but restores to him something which belongs to his life as a human being”

The Sacred Page

Sound and Light

“To hear and to see are mysterious gifts of the creator God. In this Sunday’s readings, we are invited to ponder more deeply the different senses of what it means to be blind and deaf, and how Jesus can heal us of these maladies.”

Torch

Sometimes it is all about you

“the Nazarenes do not perceive the fundamental truth about Jesus because they are afraid to accept the fundamental truth about themselves, that we do not deserve the incarnation”

The Sacred Page

Baptism as Re-Creation

“We truly begin to exist only when we enter into relationship with Christ. Life without Christ is non-existence, darkness.”

Torch

Christ the Kindly Light

“The cured man was brought by love to see not just the natural world, but also to see and share in the world being transformed in Jesus Christ”

A Catholic Moment

Seeing the Big Picture

“God truly sees the big picture, and while He cannot make our choices for us, He does bring good in any situation and is there waiting, prompting, loving”

Torch

Completing Creation

“When we can see another’s fragile humanity and hidden goodness, we can help them to find a voice and become strong and free and let others liberate us too”

Building on the Word

The Blind Leading the Blind

“It is only when we realize our mutual blindness that we can set aside all pretense and posturing, and then understand that we need to work together lest we fall into the pit. That, after all, is how the blind lead the blind—one person helping the other.”

A Catholic Moment

See the Person

“We must show restraint, and we must rely on God to help us, giving us the patience, humility and grace we need. And when all else fails, just pray. Pray for the soul of those who persecute you, and pray for their conversion. Pray for them out of love for God.”

A Catholic Moment

Out of the Darkness

“Jesus comes to us in the same way, as our companion, but yet He comes to us physically through the people in our lives – our friends, our family, our spouse, our co-workers, strangers…”

Torch

Rabbuni!

“Are we using titles for him without any real grasp of their significance? Or, is Christ the one who teaches us about the proper meaning and reality of human life – and who offers the realisation of it.”

A Catholic Moment

Field of Vision

“I think the neat thing about this parable is not so much about the treasure that is buried in the field that we know – but rather what else is in the field, that treasure that we don’t know, that we cannot even begin to understand”

A Catholic Moment

As God Sees It

“we cannot see as God sees. We are not going to understand certain moments that come by, or things that happen, or sufferings we have...All we can do is pray, and simply desire to follow His will, and trust He knows what He’s doing in our own lives”

Torch

The Vision of Faith

“when we live through faith, our lives are then given shape and content, a goal and meaning. To see things fully, as they really are, requires this supernatural gift.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Presentation of the Lord

“Does our daily intake of sensationalist, negative news stir in us compassion and recognition of Christ, the Stranger and Outcast (Psalm 69:9)? Or does it predispose us to labeling and assigning people to groups in our mind, groups to be mistrusted, feared, even hated?”

A Catholic Moment

The Longest Night

“God saw his love for Mary, the sacrifice he was willing to make, and he let Joseph get to that point where the only thing he could do was trust in God. Joseph did not know yet that his beloved Mary carried God within her. In his darkest night, God was right there, unbeknownst to him.”

A Catholic Moment

See the Forest

“Love of God, others, and ourselves is the big picture. But often it gets lost amongst the trees. Often love just slips away, and passes through the midst of the trees, just as Jesus slipped away through the crowd.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Epiphany

“It is through their profound understanding of (and connection to) the natural world that both the Magi and the shepherds were able to read nature’s signs and know God’s revelation.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Christmas Day

“We missioners, when we open our eyes and our hearts to the presence of God that surrounds us in the communities where we live, are called to be witnesses to the light that we find there”

Torch

Why Stand Looking into Heaven?

Torch

Why Do We Suffer?

“Suffering can call us to forgive. It can make us humble and aware of our dependence on the love of God. We can be blinded by our pain, but equally, it can open our eyes to what ought to have been clear all along.”

A Catholic Moment

Jesus Healed a Man Born Blind

“Jesus cares about every form of suffering that we go through during our lives. Physical illness, grief, emotional suffering, social isolation, and our spiritual dilemmas as well. There is never a time in our lives that we suffer alone.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

“We still have difficulty seeing Jesus, especially within people who are of a different religion, race or socio-economic group than we are. We can let our prejudices and fears blind us to the light of Christ emanating from others.”

Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

30th Sunday in Ordinary time

“These are the people God brings back and restores: not just the strong, the gifted, and those who can pay for assistance, but the frail and vulnerable – no one is left out”

Torch

Seeing in Love

“It can be unnerving to see God’s activity in the everyday, because it reminds us forcefully that our lives are not our own, that they are God’s loving gift to us. Perhaps, though, we can then see them as part of that same story of God’s love shown in Christ.”

Torch

Sharing His Vision

Torch

Hoping to See God

“This is what it means to be holy, in the fullest meaning of some very simple words: a saint is someone who, held in God’s loving gaze, comes to see God”

Torch

Born Blind

“The call to all of us is to share in his work, by being the light of the world in our time. We have one life span and are asked to make the best of it.”

Torch

Look!

“We are able to see and hear anew, because the arrival of God allows all to see and hear. The sign is what it signifies; God does what he shows us – open our senses to what is real.”

Torch

As Easy as Climbing a Tree

“Our faith is not just that Jesus tells us what to do or how to live, but that in seeing him we pass beyond the old way of seeing, in which we are the centre of all things, to the real world where God is the true centre, the alpha and the omega”

Torch

Take Heart, He Is Calling You

“Only when we can see and accept our weaknesses can we allow Christ to come and serve us”

Torch

A New Vision

“As the man born blind received a new capacity, a new way of experiencing the world, so too we receive a new capacity for a deeper way of life, to come to experience the familiar world around us in the unfamiliar light of Jesus, who is forever the Light of the World”

Torch

Wise Men came from the East to Jerusalem

“the visit of the Magi surely anticipates, symbolically, the possibility of mutual interest and exchange among the world’s religious traditions: opening the treasures of their wisdom even if going home by another way”

Torch

Believing is Seeing

“It was far, far more important that the man in the story followed Jesus than that he just saw other people and things. Following Jesus’ way, he saw far more.”

Torch

Seeing the Christ

ronrolheiser.com

The Danger of Riches

“When we are rich, we have a congenital incapacity to see the poor and, in not seeing them, we never learn the wisdom of the crucified”

Torch

Seeing and Believing

“Yet how often in our lives do we fail to recognise the presence of Christ? More often than not we’re more like Watson than Sherlock Holmes, wandering through life focused on our own concerns, unable to see what should be perfectly obvious.”

Torch

No Explanations

“We have to accept that there are no explanations to some things: that some are born blind, that some are beset with diseases, and that innocents suffer. It is not easy to accept, but it is a mistake to come up with easy explanations. There are no explanations to the inexplicable.”

Torch

What would you see up a tree?

“Perhaps what we need is to escape from the noise and bustle of the crowd, find a quiet spot, perhaps up a tree, and there in the stillness of our heart listen to that call which comes from God: ‘I must stay with you tonight.’ Perhaps then, just perhaps, we too might come to believe it.”

Torch

God afar and near

“The appearance of Jesus cannot be taken in at one go. Blurred perceptions have to be clarified.”

ronrolheiser.com

What Is Religion All About?

“God is light and God’s light in this world is meant, first of all, to help us see each other’s faces correctly. Religion is about charity towards each other. Everything else, dogma and morals included, is secondary.”

Building on the Word

“There is no doubt that Jesus wants us to do what is right. But the example of Peter reminds us that awe must precede action and listening must inform deciding. Yes, we are to act. But we must take in God’s glory before we take up God’s service.”

Building on the Word

“We can see, yet in each one of us there still remains a certain blindness. That blindness is something that Jesus wants to remove. He wants to take it from us, so that we can fully embrace the light. The only question is whether we will open ourselves to accept the light or stubbornly cling to the partial light that we already have.”

Building on the Word

“The action of God’s Spirit often appears as a coincidence. Yet for believers there is no such thing as coincidence. For us what appears as coincidence is the action of God in our lives.”

Building on the Word

“Simeon and Anna were able to recognize God’s presence in the infant Christ. They invite us to recognize God’s presence in our lives. They ask us to slow down, to look deeper, to recognize all the opportunities that lie around us...we must do more than look. We must be willing to see.”

Building on the Word

“Every life is blessed. But blessing has no power until it is recognized and claimed as true. That is why God is always at work opening our eyes and ears to recognize how we have been blessed.”

Building on the Word

“Bartimaeus reminds us that first we should ask to see, because it is only when we see and understand the world as it really is, that we will be able to make the world what God wants it to be”

Building on the Word

“living in the truth is not primarily about refusing to lie to others. It is chiefly about refusing to lie to ourselves. Those who live in the truth refuse to live a lie. Because living a lie can not only hurt us; but can, in time, destroy us.”

Building on the Word

“Knowing yourself is the work of a lifetime. But knowing who you are not and knowing where you are going are two steps towards greater self knowledge.”

Building on the Word

“In God’s perspective, if you have more grain than you need, the challenge is not how to store it, but how to share it. If there is more wealth than a person can use, the project is not how to find new ways to keep it, but how to give it to those who need it.”