If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts
by Deacon Bob Schenll
As some of you may know, I retired from my law practice as of the end of 2018-- after being at the same firm for more than 44 years. It was a very fun run, and I loved every minute of it, but change is not a bad thing and retirement operns up a whole world of possibilities. One of the things I had hoped to do some time ago is publish a blog where I could reflect on the day's scripture readings or the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours. It was with that thought in mind that we created a spot on the St. Richard's web page for "Deacon Bob's Blog." Unfortunately I never seemed to have the time to keep up with my posting, so the site became a place for me to post my homilies-- not a bad thing but not what I had hoped. With retirement giving me more control over my time, I'm hoping to remedy that failing and start to post thoughts/reflections more regularly, and today is the first of them. It seemed like a good day to start because today's readings at Mass-- both the first reading from the Letter to the Hebrews (Heb 3:7-14) and the Psalm (portions of Psalm 95) both feature the line "If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts." I think that admonition not to have "hard hearts" is one that we would do well to keep top-of-mind as we navigate through out lives because, quite frankly, we're living in a world where hearts seem to be getting harder and harder. Pick an issue-- immigration, health care, border security, racism, government shut-down-- the discussion barely begins and hard hearts are evident (often on both sides of the issue). Why is that? At its core, I think, "hard heartism" is fundamentaly a result of a certain kind of arrogance-- the idea that we know best and we can ought to bre in control-- allied with a willingness to blame others for whatever problematic situation exists. That's what the Jews did -- they blamed God, and Moses and Aaron, for the difficulties the people experienced in the desert. We harden our hearts when we decide we know best and are going to proceed with something which the voice of conscience within us is telling us is wrong. We internally hear and feel what we should do or say, but what we should do or say isn't consistent with what we desire, so we shut out our conscience-- harden our hearts. There is almost a physical effort that goes on as we marshall our energy towards doing what we want and beating back the urging of our heart-- of grace within us. Jesus' response to those in need was never hardness of heart. It was "pity", as we see today with the leper who comes to Jesus asking to be healed, or compassion, or love. Perhaps if we approach the issues of the day from that kind of perspective, as opposed to the perspective of hard-heartedness, we might find the solutions that now seem to be eluding us.