JUNE12025

At the end of the movie, The Wizard of Oz, the good witch asks Dorothy what she has learned after all her adventures. She answered, “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard.” The same is true even when our heart’s desire is God. Since God is so far beyond little old me, we easily imagine that to find God requires something exotic, something extraordinary, a mountaintop experience. But the coming of Jesus into our midst, the incarnation of God in the human condition, has shown that is not the case. Rather, we must look for God “in our own backyard.” That was the message the angels gave to the disciples of Jesus at the time of the Ascension.  “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?” We won’t find God “in the sky,” in somewhere beyond the normal stuff of life. Rather, we find God by plunging more deeply into humanity for that is what God did in Jesus. In particular, we look for God in the eyes of those who are hurting for that is his privileged dwelling place.