Fr. Pat McNulty from Madonna House’s reflections on the Gospel reading today:
Staring at a Mirror
by Fr. Pat McNulty.
I don’t understand why you’d do somethin’ like that right out before God an’ everybody.
Well, there was a trend in the ‘60’s to learn how to be at home “in your own skin,” your own emotions and fears. Since all of that was quite new to us bourgeois thinking folk we needed some help.
One of the popular methods in psychology at the time was called, “group therapy”—basically like-minded people working things out together with professional guidance.
Why didn’t y’all just go fishin’ and talk it out with God?
I guess because along the way we learned that some inner lies just don’t get unravelled in your life unless you “talk it out” with another human being who can challenge you and support you. (By the way, that’s really part of the genius of confession in our Catholic tradition.).
So one of the things we did in our group was to sit in front of another person and look into that person’s eyes for thirty seconds while repeating our own name over and over slowly without blinking or turning away. Then we changed places and let them do the same with us.
Afterwards we would come back together in the larger group and talk about what was going on during the eyeball-to-eyeball.
You can read the rest here.
Witnesses to Hope 