At a traffic light, we can look straight at a person holding a cardboard sign and somehow not really see them. We are not necessarily heartless. We have simply become practiced at looking without letting what we see enter us.

The trouble is, we can get used to almost anything. A lonely spouse, a tired coworker, suffering on the news, the person who clears our table whose name we never learn. Eventually, what should disturb us becomes part of the scenery.

Jesus’ Beatitudes disturb that numbness. “Blessed are you who are poor… hungry… weeping.” Jesus is not saying that poverty or grief is good. He is doing something more unsettling: he places at the center the people the world so easily pushes to the edges. Then come the woes to the rich, the full, the laughing not because comfort is evil, but because comfort can become a room with thick walls.

Peter Claver spent his ministry in Cartagena, where enslaved Africans were brought after brutal Atlantic crossings. He could not undo the whole machinery around him, but he refused to let human beings become cargo in his eyes. He went to them, cared for them, and made compassion bodily.

Paul says that “the world in its present form is passing away.” Perhaps faith begins there: when we stop assuming that what is normal must therefore be acceptable, or permanent.

And perhaps holiness is sometimes as simple and as difficult as allowing another person’s reality to reach us again.

What have I become so accustomed to seeing that I no longer really see it?

#gospelechoes #midweekreflection #gospel #stpaulofthecrossretreatcenter