Return! To your senses!

THE WORD IN ADVENT - First Friday

December 6, 2019: Isaiah 29: 17-24; Matthew 9: 27-31

'To see' is a spiritual quality; 'to hear' is a blessed disposition. The Word is full of these imageries today. The first reading speaks of the deaf who will hear, the blind who will begin to see, the lowly who begin to find joy in the Lord and the Gospel recounts one of those encounters where Christ gives sight to a blind person. 

In fact, 'to see' was the sign of the coming of the Lord... when the Baptist asked if Jesus was the Christ to come, Jesus responds saying, 'the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear and the dead are raised' (Lk 7:20,22)! Happy are those who are able to  see these and behold the presence of the Lord. Even amidst us, the glory of the Lord and the concerns of the Lord are ceaselessly being revealed - happy would we be, if only we take notice.

In the Reign of God, all shall possess the spiritual capacity to see and capacity to hear:  we shall all see, because we will have the light of the Lord; we shall hear because we will have the help of our God, as the responsorial psalm teaches us! It is not that the light and the help are not present at times, but that we are not present to them! Hence the call of the Advent today: to return to the Lord, to return to our senses, and see the presence of the Lord.

Yes, we will surely see the Lord face to face in the Reign, but today, in our daily life, we are challenged to see, to look, to hear, to perceive and to find the joy of the Lord in the midst of our routine... Can we, really? If we believe, we will. 

Let us grow everyday in our faith, to really sense the Lord, our light and our salvation. Let us pay heed to the invitation to Return, to our true senses!