Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com this is the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time and this is the opening prayer.

Almighty ever living God, increase our faith, our hope, our charity. Make us love what you command so that we may merit what you promise through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. We have a reading from Jeremiah 31st, chapter 7. Thus says the Shout with joy for Jacob. Exult at the head of the nations.

Proclaim your praise and say, the Lord has delivered his people the remnant of Israel. Behold, I will bring them back from the land of the north. I will gather them from the ends of the world with the blind and the lame in their midst, the mothers and those with child. They shall return as an immense throng. They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them. I will lead them to brooks of water on a level road so that none shall stumble.

For I am a father to Israel. Ephraim is my firstborn. The Word of the Lord Responsorial Psalm the Lord has done great things for us. We are filled with joy. When the Lord brought back the captives of Zion, we were like men dreaming. Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with rejoicing.

The Lord has done great things for us, we’re filled with joy. Then they said, among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us. We are glad indeed. The Lord has done great things for us. We’re filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, O Lord. Like the torrents in the southern desert, those that sow in tears shall reap rejoicing. The Lord has done great things for us we’re filled with joy. Although they go forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown, they shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves. The Lord has done great things for us, we’re filled with joy. A reading now from the New Testament from Letter to the Hebrews Fifth chapter, first through the sixth verse.

Brothers and sisters, every high priest is taken from among men and made their representative before God to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and the erring, for he himself is beset by weakness, and so for this reason must make sin offerings for himself as well as for the people. No one takes this honour upon himself, but only when called by God, just as Aaron was. In the same way, it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest, but rather the one who said to him, you are my son, this day I have begotten you. Just as he says in another place, you are a priest forever. According to the order of Melchizedek, the word of the Lord our Savior, Jesus Christ, destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel.

The gospel for this 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time is taken from St. Mark 10:46, 52. As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus Satan, sat by the roadside, begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, jesus, son of David, have pity on me. And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he kept calling out all the more, son of David, have pity on me.

Jesus stopped and said, call him. So they called the blind man, saying to him, take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you. He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, came to Jesus. Jesus said to him, reply, what do you want me to do for you? The blind man replied to him, master, I want to see. Jesus told him, go your way, your faith has saved you.

Immediately he received his sight and followed on the way. The Gospel of the Lord Satan. That piece of music was written particularly for my program. It was written by a young man by the name of Ryan Harner, who was, I think, a gifted composer. And we had a long conversation about what I wanted to create for this radio program. And.

And it was a piece of music that would somehow capture the experience that I pray. Happens whenever anyone listens attentively to the Word of God. And it enters into our imaginations, our hearts, and it just sits there as a moment. And there’s an image in the response to our psalm that I think is so beautiful. That implies that when people experiencing God moving in their life, they often find it’s somehow like a seed that’s planted and it just sits there for a while and it’s not that powerful and not that important. It’s just like the beginning of that song where it’s sort of soft, and then slowly it grows and becomes more full and more effective and more powerful in terms of changing the way we see the world and ourselves.

Anyway, I hope each time you hear it, it’s going to be done after each of a set of readings. I just pray it’ll be part of our time together. It’s not to be so much a time for meditating on what I said, but just let the music say what it says, which is really amazing to me. Last week, you might remember, we had an image in the gospel that was an image of the disciples coming up to Jesus and saying, hey, we’d like you to do something for us. Well, it was actually not all the disciples, but just James and his brother John. And they just asked if God would give them a place of great authority and great power.

And they just thought that was a really good idea. And Jesus just looked at him and said, you don’t even have any idea what you’re asking. So as Mark’s Gospel continues, then we have another person that asked Jesus to do something in the gospel in this set of readings. And it’s just exactly what God would like everyone to ask him. God, I want to see, I want insight, I want to know what this whole thing is about. Show me.

And so what we see in that story, a beautiful way in which it’s described by Mark, is that he’s sitting there and he’s a beggar. And that right away sets up something really wonderful, because people who are most likely to open their hearts to the mystical and the mysterious are people who feel that the practical world is not enough. And so he cries out, help me. Have pity on me. He must have heard about Jesus. He knew that he was a miracle worker and probably said, I just want to have my eyes back.

But then there’s something so much deeper in. If you think about these stories, they’re not just about the people who are in the story, but they’re about us, humanity, about all of us. And so it’s so interesting that in the time that Jesus walked the earth, there was an image of God is the source of everything. So if you were doing exactly what God wanted, your life was rich and full and you were very happy and you had no disease, no problems. But if you were blind or leprous or bad, that was because you sinned. So anybody that was in need would not be responded to by the people who were believers because they were considered being punished by God.

So they were ignored. So Here’s a man who’s probably sat there forever, people just passing him by, looking at him, saying he’s worthless. But he hears this voice. Or maybe he just couldn’t say he saw Jesus, but he must have been able to hear his voice or know that people were yelling his name. But he had a sense that he was there. And so he calls him Son of David.

So he knew the scriptures and stuff. And so he just called out and he said, please, please have pity on me. And what’s so beautiful about Jesus in this story is that let’s just say there were other people shouting. So why did he hear this one voice? One voice, have pity on me. Like the woman that he bumped into in the crowd where he felt something going out of him.

And when he healed her. So anyway, he turns around and he calls the blind man. And all of a sudden he hears these words that are so beautiful, I would think for anybody who’s on their own and wondering why I can’t figure things out. When he hears, not only is God answering my call, but he’s calling me. Jesus is calling you. God is calling you into a life with him.

God is asking you to open your heart and believe and see what he’s really about. Take courage. And then I love this. You know the word enthusiasm? Enthusiasm is such a cool word. I have an Oxford English dictionary in my office and great gift someone gave me.

And I love looking up words. And the word enthusiasm means. In theos. It means. Actually, the official translation is filled with God, filled with divinity. And so there’s something about divinity, truth, living inside of you that just.

It’s a lot of energy. And so you see this man throwing aside his cloak, springing up. You know what I mean? It’s always interesting that blind people do have a sense of direction, where they’re going, whatever. He knew where Jesus was, so he just runs over there. And when he stands there before him, he said, master, I just want to see.

Because Jesus said, what do you want me to do? Give you authority and power like my other disciples? Now I want to see. And he said, go. You have it. Your faith has saved you.

Your faith has saved you. Not the state you’re in, not the sin that they claimed you committed or that your parents committed that put you in a place of punishment. No, it’s your faith that has saved you. So in his blindness, this is what’s interesting. Faith, in a way, is kind of blind when you think about it. I mean, you have a way of understanding or seeing something.

And Somebody says, well, show me. Show me that. Prove to me that God exists. Or show me that the God that is often absent from people. Take the beginning. The first reading is about this relationship God has with people.

It’s weird. You want to say God, did you really want to have this kind of relationship with us where he is absent and then he’s present. He’s absent and he’s present. Your life is going well, and it seems to be blessed. And then all of a sudden, everything’s falling apart and he’s gone. And there’s this image in the Old Testament particularly, which is the great journey from freedom, from slavery to freedom.

You see this God always somehow saying, you know, trust me, stay with me while things are not the way you want them to be. See if you can trust me when I’m absent. Because if you can’t trust me in my absence, then somehow you won’t have the relationship with me that I want. Because I have to put you through times that are empty and dark. And if you don’t, if you can’t endure those, if you think I’m only present when things are light and bright, then you won’t grow. There’s this mysterious thing about the pain and suffering, experiencing darkness in your life that is so crucial for you to live in the light.

And so you have this difficulty often trusting in God. And so faith is a belief that isn’t based solely on the experience of something that’s happening that proves to you right now that the thing that you want is there. Faith is believing in it when it’s not there. Believing in something that you can’t explain, that you can’t figure out. And in those moments of darkness and weakness, you just sort of say, all right, I’ve got two choices. I can give up on this whole thing about God and divinity and all that, or I can stay with it and wait.

Because somehow when I’m in that experience of having nothing or. Or nothing around me has any light, or I’m just staring into darkness. And you still believe. That’s when it happens. That’s when things change. Amazing.

And Jesus, when he was walking this earth, he was teaching that to people. Accept the emptiness and the darkness as part of your life. It’s just God’s plan. And so you have, in Hebrews, this strange reading in a way where it’s talking about Jesus saying that Jesus had to make up for his sins. You know, well, how do you do that? I mean, what are the sins that Jesus would have committed?

I mean, it’s he had to do something to offer a sin offering for himself. And what it would mean is that Jesus as a man had to experience the same experiences we have in this world. And when I think about Jesus being sinless as a man and Mary also being in our Catholic tradition, Mary was without sin. Did that mean they didn’t make mistakes, that they didn’t fail at something? Did they do everything perfectly? No, that couldn’t be possibly right.

No, what they didn’t ever do is doubt. In their brokenness, in their inability, Jesus did some things that you could say objectively weren’t so wise. I mean, he yelled and ranted, raved at the leadership of the church. Try that out even today. Attack the leadership. And they’re going to, of course, listen and embrace you and say, oh, what a great new idea.

We hadn’t thought about that. No, they’re going to. They’re going to come back with vengeance in a way. You say Jesus was shooting himself in the foot in a way, when he didn’t have more patience with the leadership of the church. Well, that’s his humanity. That beautiful thing about Jesus is he’s like us.

He loses it. He gets upset. He doesn’t want to do what his Father is asking. And so he has to make up for that, in a sense. And how do you make up for that? Well, I don’t think it’s something you have to do that’s good.

I think you make up for it by simply enduring it and not imagining that you are the failure, you’re not the failure. Human nature fails us in a sense, if we’re going to expect to be all that God wants us to be immediately. Human nature is a process of growing, losing everything and then finding more and then losing it again and then finding even more. It’s this dark and light, dark and light, emptiness, fullness. That’s why in the first reading you have this image of There are moments in God’s relationship with his people when they have been gone and they have gone in the wrong direction and they’re blind and they’re lame and they’re wounded by their mistakes. And yet he calls them back.

And there’s this wonderful image of fullness out of emptiness. So important for us to believe. That’s the way it works. It isn’t that we move from level one to level two, level three, level four, level five. No, it goes level one and two and then you go to zero and below zero and then back up. And it’s patience and understanding and compassion for our Human nature that God wants us to see and believe in.

And believe that he, God is always in charge. He’s always able to be the one that enables us to go through the darkness and not lose hope. Not lose hope, not lose faith, not lose trust. I don’t know what Bartimaeus must have felt as he sat the time I guess he was born, he was blind, but his whole life was being a blind beggar. When you think of that, it’s not a bad image of some of us. When we get to a certain place where we don’t see anything like the truth and all the things that we choose to fill us with are emptiness, nothing but emptiness.

That’s a pretty good image of that experience. So faith, faith, faith, when we’re in those moments is what God will give us. That’s his gift. It’s not earned, it’s a gift. But like anything that God gives, it is something that you can’t count on having an experience that proves that it’s there in this moment. In fact, he almost on purpose.

Well, I say yes, on purpose. Gives you a feeling that there’s nothing there for you. And yet you’re supposed to believe that that nothingness has a purpose, has meaning. And you can’t miss that. If you look at the Old Testament, New Testament, the way God works in human beings, it’s this constant cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth. So whenever you’re in a darkness, in the darkness of blindness, and can’t see what God is really doing, remember this story of Bartimaeus.

Because in the midst of the darkness, God is calling you into the light. You just have to see. You have to be in the darkness before the light can become as strong and as bright and as life giving as it really is. Gray is the worst place to live, but fullness and emptiness is the cycle. And when you embrace it, believe in it and trust in it, there’s no thing that’s sort of like, it’s hopeless, it’s all dark, it’s all black. You’re free of that forever when you have faith and trust in the one who’s guiding you.

The closing prayer Father, you are, in a way, a taskmaster. You’re not easy to be with, you’re not easy to work with in the sense that you really do put us through test after test, but always with a heart filled with love for us, knowing that these tests and these darkness bring such light and such growth and such truth, help the part of us that’s like Bartimaeus to reach out and trust in you, call on you. And when we do, help us to recognize how much the truth is that you’re calling us always through our faith into new life. And we ask this in Jesus name. Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show.

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Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.