Opening Our Ears, Opening Our Hearts
Like Pinocchio who ignored his conscience, we risk hardening our hearts. Jesus’s lament reminds us that attentive listening—to God, to others, to our own conscience—is the doorway from “woe” to blessing.
Reading: Luke 11:47-54
The following homily was preached to the student brothers during Compline. You can listen here or read below:
Even if they are highly intelligent and perhaps even rather handsome animals, if one day we woke up and found ourselves turned into donkeys, I do not think we would be very pleased. This is what happens to the protagonist of a famous Italian children’s book: The Adventures of Pinocchio. Pinocchio is a wooden puppet who begins by ignoring the voice of his conscience — embodied in the story by a talking cricket. By refusing to listen, he moves further away from his desire to become truly human until he and his naughty friends end up turned into donkeys, unable even to speak.
Pinocchio is a vivid image of what happens when we shut our hearts to the truth. In today’s Gospel, Jesus laments over a long history of such deafness which has produced a spiral of violence: from Abel at the beginning of the world to the prophets of all times, too often humanity has refused to listen to those sent by God. “Woe to you,” he says, not as a curse, but as a cry of sorrow — a divine grief over too many closed hearts.
Our Dominican Constitutions (LCO 77) speak of a propensio — a natural inclination of the human heart toward truth. We are made for truth, and yet our hearts can harden; we can become defensive, preferring self-protection to conversion. Jesus himself met this resistance; for the scribes and Pharisees began to oppose him fiercely, lying in wait to catch him in something he might say. It is easier to silence truth than to be transformed by it.
Yet God never stops speaking. The healing for such hardness of heart begins precisely in listening. Listening is a real struggle which requires humility, attentiveness, and the courage to set aside our deaf and self-centred ego. By truly listening — to conscience, to one another, and above all to Christ, the living Word — we allow grace to enter and transform us.
In this way, the Gospel “woe” is not the last word; it is an appeal to let grace in. It calls us away from obstinate pride and back to the saving dialogue with God. Pinocchio’s story ends when he finally listens and learns to love; the wooden puppet becomes a real boy. May we always strive to listen to the truth, so that the “woe” of judgment may become the “blessed” of those who hear the Word of God and keep it (cf. Lk 11:28).
Image: ‘Flevit super illam’ (1892), Enrique Simonet. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
