Brett's Two-Cents

Hello everyone. Bishop Barron had an interesting reflection this past week for Wednesday’s gospel, in which Jesus declares that it is not that which goes into us that makes us unclean, but rather that which comes out of a person, from their heart. Barron said:
 

How often the Bible speaks of the “heart.” By that it means the core of the self, the deepest center of who we are, that place from which our thoughts and actions arise. God wants to penetrate that heart, so that he is the center of our souls. But there is something terribly black in the human heart. We are made in the image and likeness of God, but that image can be so distorted by sin as to be barely recognizable. Our faith clearly teaches the awful truth of the fall, and we see the evidence of it in the mystery of sin, which is not to be ignored, not to be trifled with, not to be rationalized away. We are all capable of dark and evil acts. I’m not okay and neither are you.

 
Lent is just a couple of weeks away, and Barron’s reflection led me to thinking about what a counter-cultural season Lent is. So much of the prevailing zeitgeist would tell us that if we’re unhappy with our lives, the cause must be “out there” somewhere, someone else’s fault.

As Fr. Dave has said, we can waste so much time looking for external solutions to internal problems. Without denying the reality of injustice and the sins of others, Lent would have us look first inside of ourselves for a solution to our unhappiness. Where is the brokenness inside of me that needs the mercy of God? Where is the wound that I’m afraid to let God touch? To what do I continue to cling, rather than surrender it to God’s mercy and Providence?


Until we begin to allow God to heal the hurt inside of us, we’ll never be able to address the hurt of the world around us. . . .