Eventide & Altar

You have tasted that the Lord is good. The knowing that comes through tasting is different from the knowing that comes through reasoning - it is the intimate knowledge of someone who has been given something and received it with the senses. Like newborn infants long for pure spiritual milk - the longing is bodily, instinctive, the whole organism oriented toward the nourishment it needs.

Bartimaeus does not reason his way to Jesus. He hears and he cries out. The crowd tells him to be quiet. He cries out all the more. The faith that gets Jesus to stop is not sophisticated - it is the unstoppable cry of the person who has tasted enough to know what he is missing. Go, your faith has saved you. He received his sight and followed on the way.

Like living stones let yourselves be built into a spiritual house. The living stone is built with others. You are not the whole house - you are a stone in the house that is being built from all the living stones together. In the evening of life, you are a stone that has been placed for decades. The building around you is larger than you can see.

The Luminous Mysteries illuminate the public ministry - the healings, the teachings, the transfiguration. Bartimaeus follows on the way immediately after receiving his sight. Pray the Luminous Mysteries as a meditation on what the sight that comes from faith enables - the following on the way that blindness prevented.

• For those who have been told to be quiet, that Jesus would stop and call them the way he stopped for Bartimaeus, we pray to the Lord.
• For those in the evening of life who have tasted that the Lord is good, that the tasting would deepen rather than dim as the years continue, we pray to the Lord.
• In this Sacred Heart month, for those whose longing for the Lord is instinctive and bodily like a newborn's - that the milk they long for would be given, we pray to the Lord.

What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asks it of Bartimaeus after stopping everything to call him. Answer the question tonight in your own name. Specifically - not in general. What do you want him to do for you? Say it. He stopped for the unstoppable cry.