There is something deeply moving in the way God speaks at the beginning of today’s first reading: “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the desert.” God remembers the beginning. He remembers when Israel trusted him, when the relationship was fresh, when the people followed him into the wilderness with little more than his promise to sustain them.

The image is almost like that of a bridegroom remembering the first love of his bride. And then comes one of the saddest questions in all of Scripture: “What fault did your ancestors find in me that they withdrew from me?”  God is not really asking; He knows what happened. This is a lament, the sorrowful question of someone whose love has been taken for granted.

God had brought his people out of slavery. He had led them through the desert. He had given them a fertile land. Yet once they entered that land and began to prosper.. And they began to forget. They had the priestly rituals, the sacrifices, the Law and even the great symbols of God’s presence: the Tent of Meeting and the Ark of the Covenant. But somewhere along the way, they stopped looking for God – or worse yet just assumed He would be there… there when needed. In the between times….meh.

In the Gospel, the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks to the crowds in parables. Jesus responds by quoting the prophet Isaiah: “They look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.” The problem is not that God has stopped speaking. The problem is that hearts are paying attention. The people have stopped listening.

Today was not the first time you’ve heard these readings. Were you paying attention to more than the words or were you waiting for the homily to tell you what it all means? At that point you’re listening to the homilist. A heart that is open hears the voice of God within the story, the reading and within the homily. An inattentive heart grows dull and hears only words.

Jeremiah describes how that dullness begins. It begins when people abandon “the source of living waters” and dig for themselves “broken cisterns that hold no water.” A cistern was meant to collect and preserve water. But a cracked cistern slowly loses everything placed within it. That is Jeremiah’s picture of all the things we expect to satisfy us apart from God.

Success can become a broken cistern. Possessions can become a broken cistern. Approval, comfort, entertainment, control, even constant busyness can become broken cisterns. They may hold our attention for a time, but they cannot satisfy the deepest thirst of the human heart. And the tragedy is that the more we depend upon those substitutes, the less able we become to recognize the living water when it is offered to us.

This can happen even in the spiritual life. We may still come to Mass, still say familiar prayers, receive the Sacraments and more. Yet familiarity can slowly replace attentiveness. We may know when to stand, sit, and kneel, but stop expecting God to speak. We may hear the readings, but no longer ask, “Lord, what are you saying to me today?” We may receive the Eucharist, but forget the wonder that the Lord himself has drawn near. The greatest danger is not always that we abandon the faith dramatically.Sometimes it is that we remain outwardly close while inwardly losing our sense of wonder. 

But today’s readings also contain hope.

God begins by saying: “I remember.” Israel forgets, but God remembers. The people wander, but God remembers the covenant. Their love grows cold, but God remembers their first love and calls them back. That is how God deals with us as well.

He does not remember our failures in order to hold them against us. He remembers the person we were created to become. He remembers every sincere beginning, every act of trust, every moment when we allowed him to lead us. And he continues to invite us back. Not merely back to religious routine. Back to relationship, to attentiveness, to the living water. 

Today, perhaps our prayer can be very simple:

• “Lord, restore in me a listening heart.”
• Help me not merely to hear your Word, but to receive it.
• Help me not merely to look, but to see.
• Help me not merely to practice the faith, but to love you again with freshness, gratitude, and wonder.

For the tragedy of forgotten love is not that God stops loving us. It is that we forget how deeply we have always been loved.

Image credit: Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection | Alexander Ivanon | Russian Museum | PD-US