During his presentation on “Seeing with the Eyes of the Soul,” Father Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, challenged participants “to cure [their] blindness.” He encouraged participants to “look at the familiar until it becomes unfamiliar again” and “to look at things anew and with a different view, with the eyes of a child.”
Father Rolheiser added that “in teaching the Gospel, we need to stop protecting ourselves … we need to grieve, we need to cry.” Out of grief growth can be found.
He spoke of the metanoia that is imperative for growth, reflecting that how in very recent years we have moved more to paranoia from what is found in the evening news — fears of terrorism, shootings, disease. We have become afraid and self-protecting.
We need now to move beyond fear to metanoia, from self-protection to become believers. Father Rolheiser emphasized the need to move away from self-protection to cure our blindness.
