The Kingdom of God is at hand…But do we “see it”?…..Words will never penetrate the heart the way seeing the Gospel in action radically lived can

Today at Holy Mass we hear a passage from St Mark…A man named Bartimaeus, who was blind calls to Jesus and asks him for help…."Master, I want to see”…..Clearly one can understand that being blind must be a very difficult thing to deal with in life but there is a deeper meaning to Bartimaeus’s request…..A person can have his / her sight and still be very blind….All of us have a fallen nature and because of this reality human beings tend to “see” and “hear” selectively…What do I mean by that?….We see what we want to see in order for our minds to validate our lifestyle….One can say human beings have selective-sight….Jesus today gave Bartimaeus his physical sight back but he also gives him something much more….By turning to Christ, Bartimaeus sheds all the impediments that prevented him from “seeing” reality as it truly is…..So the question today is…Do we want to see?….Not to see “selectively” but see everything about ourselves and the world that need to be addressed and changed…This is the sight that Jesus offers us…And this kind of vision only is given to those who open their heart to the Holy Spirit……But in order for the Holy Spirit to give us sight…We must “clear the way” for it….God can not fill us if we are full of ourself

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”

When we read the Bible we will find that there are numerous stories of men and women who are blind and how their sight was returned to them…The story today about Bartimaeus is just one of many of those stories…..How about today?…..How many of us are blind?…..We walk by people who are hungry on the streets…Innocent children are murdered in the womb of their mothers and we do not blink an eye……Mortal sin is accepted and even embraced by our society in a matter of fact way and no one cares…..God sees things very differently than the way we do…And in order to become the people we were born to be, we must learn to see as God sees

“Since sin is universal, those who pretend not to need salvation are blind to themselves”

Far too many Catholics have never encountered a holy person…When one does, such a person almost looks through you….And you feel their gaze upon you in a tangible way…This is why only saints change the world…Saints impact the world around them by almost placing a mirror in front of people allowing them to see themselves as they truly are…In doing so, many acknowledge what they “see” for the first time and begin the process of changing…….I have seen this many times play out in my work with Mother Teresa’s sisters over the years…People of all walks of life witnessing holiness for the first time in the sisters and because of what they saw they change…..Words will never penetrate the heart the way seeing the Gospel in action radically lived can…..I have told this story before but its worth repeating….My first full day in India I was headed to the Home from the Dying and Destitute run by the Missionaries of Charity with a young woman from America…Her name was Sarah and she was showing me how to get to this home by taking a public bus…When we arrived I witnessed Sarah see a street woman who she knew…This woman was so dirty words can not properly describe her…Upon Sarah seeing her, she hugged her like this street woman was her own mother…She meant it too, nothing was fake about the gesture….Upon seeing this, I literally almost fell over!!!!…I could not believe my own eyes…..And in a sense, I realized just how “blind” I was…..Seeing things for the first time can be enlightening…Only radical love demonstrated can “open our eyes”….This is the love Christ has for us…This is the love we must show the world…To open the eyes of the “bind”

“The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous.”

Getting back to our friend Bartimaeus from the gospel today from Mass….Bartimaeus kept calling out to Jesus and as he did many people tried to silence him….”And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he kept calling out all the more”…….Jesus eventually respond to Bartimaeus because of his persistence….Because Bartimaeus persisted, he received his sight…..What can we learn from this story?…To a degree we are all “blind”….We only see what we want to see….And only radical love demonstrated in real time can “open our eyes” to a world that we never thought existed but stands right before us……But in order to re-gain our sight, like Bartimaeus we must be persistent…… Bartimaeus understood that he was blind and to some degree we too are also blind...Do we have the courage to acknowledge our own blindness and to call out to Christ for sight?

The Kingdom of God is at hand…But do we “see it”?….Words will never penetrate the heart the way seeing the Gospel in action radically lived can