Friday August 4, 2017
Familiarity breeds contempt or, at the least, indifference. It is so because the more familiar something becomes, the more we take it for granted, and fail to see its uniqueness. This is especially dangerous in human relationships. Those with whom we are very familiar—our own family members and townsfolk—become such commonplace presences in our life that we cease to “see” them anymore. We have organized our life in a particular manner that takes for granted the people who are regularly around us in a defined place and scope. But when something extraordinary bursts forth through them, we either fail to recognize it, or when we do we minimize it because it upsets our life space and familiar ways of living. We then cut them down to size, force them into silence, or just ignore them. Indeed, no prophet is welcome in her own family and hometown.
Let us pray for the freshness of sight to see people as who they are, and not what we want them to be.
