A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to the crowds, no one lights a lamp and puts the lamp under a bushel basket or under a bed. He puts it on a lampstand so that whoever comes into the house can see it. There is nothing hidden that will not be exposed, nothing concealed that will not be known and brought to light. Take heed, therefore, how you hear.
To the man who has, more will be given, and he who has not will lose even the little that he thinks he has. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Our lord said, take heed therefore how you hear.
Take heed how you hear. I don't know precisely what our blessed Lord meant by that, but as soon as I saw that, I thought immediately of a sentence from Saint Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth century, where he says, whatever we know, we know according to the mode, the fashion, the capacity of the knower. In other words, speak if we think of our faculties of knowing as a mirror reflecting what we call objective reality, whatever that is, but that's what we think out there, that the world is out there. The mirror is not an absolutely pure, imageless mirror. From the moment we are come into this world, we are building up a certain background in our minds, and then everything we that comes in through our senses is in some way or other interpreted, judged, accepted, passed upon by what I would call the furniture in the mind already.
The mirror is has a lot of images on it already that's supposed to be reflecting the world. Matter of fact, it may be colored. Or put it in another way, a person with rose colored glasses, or green glasses, or pink glasses, or any other kind of glasses. If they put them on and see the world out there, everything they see is going to have the color of those glasses. They're going to think the world out there is colored according to the glass.
There are a few sentences, and they're relatively few. But this idea that whatever we know is known according to the measure of the knower is extremely profound, profound as anything. Take the idea of prejudice. What do you mean by a prejudice? The word means a prejudgment.
What does that mean? That means in the back of my head, I have a certain attitude towards people or places or books or music or art or anything you want. It's in my head. I like this, I don't like that. I love this, I dislike that.
And something comes in that fits into the category of I like it. Therefore, that is good, that is beautiful, that is lovely, that is valuable, that's real art. On the other hand, it comes into me and it fits into the other category of what I don't like, and then automatically I judge the individual by some prejudgment. The furnishings of the intelligence or the memory, it all comes into play. See, what we're talking about is knowledge, human knowledge.
And our blessed lord says, look, he's talking to the crowd. And it's the crowd which is so easily moved by the demagogue. As Horace said, I hate the common crowd. And he said, Artio, I keep them at a distance because it's dangerous. A mob is a dangerous thing.
And our blessed lord is saying, be careful how you hear. How you hear. What does he mean how you hear? Clean your ears out every morning? Turn your head around so that the full volume gets in there?
What does he mean? Well, as I say, I don't know what he meant any more than you do. We've both we've heard the text. There it is. Take heed how you hear.
In other words, one thing is sure. Our blessed lord is giving us some kind of a warning. He's telling us there's danger here. There's a situation here you have to be conscious of. You have you're you're dealing with a problem here.
You have to be concerned with it. What are you being concerned with? The the physical the physical operation of hearing, is that what he's telling us? Or is he telling us something supremely more important than that? Is he telling us that we should be on our guard about how we deal with what we hear?
That's what I think he's saying. He's saying don't accept as prima facie an obvious truth everything that comes at you. And remember, blessed Lord wasn't living in the days of the great media. Notice that's a plural noun, media. We're surrounded with this stuff.
You can't avoid it. You can't get on an elevator, you can't go into your dentist office, you can't even go in surgery to have somebody carve you up without having some kind of a media getting at you. We are living in a world that's almost drowning in the media. And if it was true in our Lord's day that men and women of some common sense and reasonableness ought to be aware of what they hear. It is surely true today.
When we are so much the victims, not only what we hear because this applies to all our senses. And remember, my only contact with this, what we call the objective world, is through my senses. That's all. A person born blind will never have an awareness of color, in the sense of color, whatever color it is. And so, today, remember, what you see is much more impressive than what you hear.
But today, both the ear and the eye, each one is being attacked and practically drowned in the material that is fed into us. It's very difficult today to be careful about what you hear. It isn't a matter so much of censoring what comes in, it's a matter of sifting what comes in. It's a matter of being intelligent enough to say, how do I know? You see, I saw, you know, several years ago, a moving picture called The Tale of Two Cities.
I was pretty young when I first saw it. I'd read the book, but that is the novel. Because that's what it is, it's a fiction. But you see, it tells me about the French Revolution. And as long as I live, the French Revolution will be that blooming picture I saw.
I can't erase those pictures. We know they're false. We know that Dickens got the stuff from McAuley, and McAuley got it out a lot of it out of his head. But you see, once once your senses, once you see something, once you hear something, you may your mind may say, I discredit that. It's false.
But by golly, your memory holds it. Your memory retains it. This is the problem, you see. This matter of truth, I impinged on it yesterday quite a little bit. It's a very sensitive issue, but today people aren't aware of it.
That is when when what is the proof? You go and that's what you think is the truth. Let me tell you, of course what you see is a picture of something that was taken, but what was it? What's been omitted? What hasn't been shown to you?
What hasn't been said? How about that if you're after the truth? After all, nobody with with a brain cell working ever tells a downright lie. That's not it's ridiculous because someone will find you out and you'll be embarrassed. The way to do is to lie by telling the truth.
And so our blessed see, today these two readings have to do with being loving our neighbor. One's from the old testament Proverbs, the other is from our blessed Lord. What is telling us is, you have to watch what comes in to your minds. You have to set in judgment. You have to be on your guard, you have to analyze, you have to be in a position of questioning, of rejecting, of holding yourself in doubt.
There are plenty of situations where you say, I don't know whether it's this or that, I can't make up my mind. Don't make up your mind if you don't have the evidence and if the question is important enough. That's just common sense. It's also very good Christian love. If people if if we could only bring into our I mean our daily living within our families, in our jobs, in our our associations and recreation.
If only we could bring in there a very skeptical attitude, especially what we hear about people. And above all what we hear about the dead. It seems that some people think that they can say anything they want about the past, about men and women who have lived and have had their being. And that since they're dead, well, they have no rights. You can lie about the dead.
And so this I am really hipped on this idea that whatever we know, we know is known according to the mode of the knower. And the worst thing that can keep us from knowing anything is a prejudice, because that closes us off to do all analyses of evidence. Because prejudice will not abide evidence, because if prejudice in the best sense of the word it does not have evidence. Evidence. And so to come down to some practical things when anything you see or hear, this is a matter of credibility, remember.
Who says it? How do they know? How do I know they said it? Were they in a position to know what they're talking about? Have I reason to think they are honest and not cheating by leaving out things, by emphasizing things?
And you know how this is done with pictures. There is no lie so impressive as the lie on a photograph. We've had in many instances of it, many international instances of it. And so these words of our lord this morning, take heed how you hear. It's common sense, but it's the highest level of charity, love of God and love of neighbor.
In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.