Last weekend Julie and I watched the movie "Calvary", an Irish film made in 2014 about a good priest dealing with pain and suffering, including the pain of a man who was repeatedly abused by a priest as a young boy. Towards the end of the movie the good priest's dog has his throat cut, and the priest is heartbroken. He sobs uncontrollably. A bit later, the good priest is asked whether he did the same when he thought of boys abused by his brother priests, and the good priest admits that he did not. Why, he is asked? I was detached from that, he admits. In other words, he did not have the same heartfelt connection to those victims that he had to his dog. Towards the victims of abuse his heart was "hardened," not open, not available for an emotional connection. Completely understandable, I suppose. But that same problem, which Jesus today calls hardness of heart (Mk 6: 45-52), is something about which we might spend a bit of time in prayer. Do we all suffer from hardness of heart? Mark says that is the problem for the disciples, who are terrified on a wavey night in a boat on the Sea of Gallilee and see Jesus walking towards them and think it is a ghost. Jesus tells them to "take courage" (the root word of "courage" is the Latin word, "cor", which means "heart") and not to be afraid. Essentially He is saying that they should open their hearts to Him, and in that way appreciate who He is-- something that Mark tells us they had not done ("they had not understood the incident of the loaves. On the contrary, their hearts were hardened"-- Mark says). Hearts that are hard cannot grieve for others because, well, those others are not us. Hard hearts are detached, disconnected, lacking in true courage because they have no empathy. Hard hearts cannot understand Jesus because His life and His teaching is all about self-giving love, not about self-glorification. How soft is your heart? (Yes, I get the irony that in modern American culture to be "soft hearted" or a "softie" is a criticism-- but that doesn't make the criticism valid.) Does it bother you emotionally when your government kills someone just because they deserved killing, either in this country or half-way around the world? When you hear the latest abuse story (not just in the Church-- there are plenty of other places where abuse has happened) how do you react? With sadness, even horror? I could go on, but you get the point. One of the problems of our modern culture is that we see and hear so many examples of terrible, horrific situations that our hearts can get "hard." We get sort of numb. Don't let that happen-- because when you're numb to the horror, the next thing you know you're dumb to the miracle as well. And that's not a good place to be.