Seeing with the eyes of the heart…

Each of us has a story. Sometimes we embrace them, and sometimes we hide them. 

But we often forget that those around us also have a story…

The bench in front of me shifted yet again - for the third time now - crowding me further and causing me to try to shift my position once more as I knelt on the pavers of the outside nave at St. James Church in Medjugorje. Thousands of pilgrims were adoring our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament exposed on the outdoor altar.

My distraction turned to irritation as two young women seated in front of me began to turn and talk - albeit quietly - to each other and to their companions seated in front of them. Then the woman in front of me reached down into her bag, pulling out her phone, and I was distracted further as my eyes were then drawn away from our Lord and instead over her shoulder to what she was doing with her phone. She opened her pictures.  And immediately I judged, thinking: seriously?

Then suddenly my attentiveness to the increasing pain in my shifting and crowded knees turned to the evident pain in this young woman’s heart. Yes, she had opened her photos, and I saw her choosing first one then another of a young man in military fatigues and a helmet. Using her finger and thumb she zoomed in closely on the face of this young man first in one photo and then the other, pausing to gaze upon the close-up of his face in each.

Leaning forward, she ran a hand through her hair, her restlessness betraying the anguish and suffering of her heart.

I was convicted of how quickly I had judged her shifting of positions, which had resulted in the moving bench behind which I had been kneeling and resting my elbows, to an inattentiveness to our Lord, when it was likely all she could do to sit there before Him in her pain.

As I write this I am immediately reminded of a time in my own life. A time when I also could not stay still, could not settle or even sit down really, doing anything to avoid the reality of an enormous loss, of a life that had been ripped out from under me, a loss over which I had very little control. How quickly our human attention turns right back to ourselves instead of the one in front of us.

It is a brutal reminder of the stories and the fragility of the lives that surround us, the lives of those placed in our path for reasons sometimes known only by God.  It is a reminder of our own fallen nature and a call to gentleness and charity and love of neighbor, of turning away from judgement, of dying to self and opening our hearts to desire the good of the other.

I don’t know the fate of the young soldier in the photograph, whether he is alive and in danger in war, or whether he has already been killed, yet his face and this moment have now become engraved in my mind.

I pray for his safety and sanctification if he is alive, that he may not leave this world without being assured of eternal salvation, and if he is already passed on, may his soul, as well as the heart of the young woman who gazed upon his face before our Lord, rest in the peace of Christ.

And so without knowing the stories or the crosses of the people whom God places before us, may we choose always to honor and treat each and every one of them with charity, patience, and human dignity.. with love.

May we see one another with the eyes of the heart, through the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Mother, who knows well the stories of all her children.

Written by the Holy Spirit through my pen at the foot of Mt. Krizevac in Medjugorje on the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Mt. Krizevac, Medjugorje