Posted on 09/05/2021 4:14:21 PM PDT by ebb tide
Recalling the today’s Gospel reading which presents Jesus who heals a deaf man with a speech impediment, Pope Francis observed the many actions Jesus took in healing him: putting his finger into the man’s ears, touching his tong with saliva and looking up to heaven and then saying to him “Ephphatha”, that is, “Be opened!”. Perhaps, the Pope suggested, it was because the man’s condition of deafness had a special symbolic value and can say something to all of us, since we all have ears, but “very often we are not able to hear”.
The Pope descirbed this as an “interior deafness” that we can ask Jesus to heal today. And “the healing of the heart begins with listening”. He pointed out that the deafness of the heart is worse than physical deafness, because we can become impervious to everyone and everything in our haste and busyness, sometimes closing ourselves off to the Lord and our brothers and sisters. By listening and letting ourselves be touched by people’s lives we can learn to live and grow in faith.
The Pope asked us to reflect on how our capacity to listen is going and if we spend time with those are close to us. He noted that in family life in particular, we need to be aware if we tend to be the ones always doing the talking, reapeating the same things, since we are in incapable of listening. “Starting a dialogue often happens not through words but silence”, he pointed out, and that requires patience to listen to others and about their challenges and hopes.
(Excerpt) Read more at vaticannews.va ...
Ping
You beat me to it.
Also, he doesn’t care to listen to observant Roman Catholics.
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