"He continued to pray just as he had always done." Daniel 6:10
Begin
Silence, Stillness, and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading: Luke 7:36-39
"When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went
to the Pharisee’s house and
reclined at the table. A woman in that town who lived a sinful
life learned that Jesus was
eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. As she stood behind him at his feet
weeping, she began to wet his feet
with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and
poured perfume on them.
When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”
Devotional
The
Pharisee did not see the sinful woman as a human being loved by God. He saw
a sinner, an interruption, and a person without the right to be at the
dinner table. Jesus saw her very differently.
Love
springs from awareness. It is only inasmuch as you see someone as he or
she really is here and now and not as they are in your memory or your
desire or in your imagination or
projection that you can truly love them, otherwise it is not
the person that you love but the idea that you have formed of this
person, or this person as the object
of your desire not as he or she is in themselves.
Therefore
the first act of love is to see this person or this object, this reality as
it truly is. And this involves the enormous discipline of dropping your
desires, your prejudices, your
memories, your projections, your selective way of looking,
a discipline so great that most people would rather plunge headlong
into good
actions and service than submit to the burning fire of this asceticism.
. . . So the
first
ingredient of love is to really see the other.
The
second ingredient is equally important to see yourself, to ruthlessly flash
the light of awareness on your motives, your emotions, your needs, your
dishonesty, your self-seeking, your tendency to control and
manipulate.73
—Anthony De Mello
Question
to Consider
What
sometimes distracts you from seeing the people you are with as they really
are?
Prayer
Lord,
I have been forgiven for much more than I will ever realize. Yet I can relate to
the Pharisee in this parable. Help me to slow down and be present with
you and others so that I might truly see people as you do. In Jesus’ name,
amen.
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