Soul Seeing

Soul Seeing: The world stopped 23 years ago: April 19, 1990. Three-and-a-half-year-old Elizabeth closed her eyes and slumped.

I was sitting at my prayer desk the other night, two flickering candles in front of me, letting my mind wander as I looked at the small framed icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help that once belonged to my grandmother. It’s an inexpensive framed image, one that she must have had since the 1960s at least, but in the candlelight it shone like pure gold. And as I looked at it – a picture I see every single day -- I noticed something. For the first time, I realized that Mary and Jesus were holding hands.

That moved me.

"Raise your hand when you hear a beep," the nurse instructed me. She held the testing device in my ear and I waited for a beep.

And waited.

"Nothing?" she inquired.

"No," I answered, hoping the instrument wasn't working. But I never got to raise my hand that morning because I never heard a beep.

Easter reflection: Holy Week spurs us to recall that first Easter morning dawning on a world not unlike our own.