What is the ‘interior eye’? In the gospels of Matthew and Luke we have this pithy saying by Jesus: “The lamp of the body is the eye. It follows if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light” (Mt 6:23). What is a ‘sound’, healthy eye? In what follows I will be quoting St. Bernard on this saying of Jesus. On Precepts and Dispensation Bernard writes: “I believe two things are necessary for the interior eye to be truly simple; that is, charity in the intention and truth in the choice” (XIV, 36, p.133). ‘Charity in the intention and truth in the choice’: St. Bernard’s statement on the ‘interior eye’ should cause us to pause. Have we really grasped the utter necessity and importance of the interior eye that observes all that is going on within the heart and soul? How essential this is for monastic life and for any life seeking God, seeking truth and justice, seeking to love even our enemies. Bernard connects the ‘interior eye’ that radiates light with simplicity, meaning integrity, clarity, purity. With the simplicity or integrity of the interior eye, one has charity in intention and truth in choice…love and truth partner to make the interior eye sound…

Friday of the Seventh Week of Ordinary TimeSaint Bede the Venerable (673-735)
Readings of the day: RB 6 Restraint of SpeechMass: Jm 5:9-12; Resp Ps 103; Mk 10:1-12


N.B. This reflection closed a week-long retreat for a community of Benedictine monks.
Because of the hard

Readings of the day: RB Prol 8-13Mass: 1 Co 15:1-8; Resp Ps 19; Jn 14:6-14


I AM THE WAY AND THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE.
I do not want to be doomed to mediocrity in my feeling for Christ. I want to feel. I want to love. Take me, dear Lord, and set me in the direction I am to go.(F. O’Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.

Fourth Sunday of Lent
I like to begin with the last sentence from the gospel of this Sunday and then move to the beginning two sentences of the same gospel.   The last sentence reads: ‘Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his or her works may be clearly seen as done in God’ (John 3:21).  Is this not something we a