Readings (Year A):
Revelation 7:2–4, 9–14
Psalm 24:1bc–2, 3–4ab, 5–6
1 John 3:1–3
Matthew 5:1–12a
Reflection: What is making you restless this week?
I recently caught up with a high school student I taught several years ago. Already graduated from college and living a full life in a bustling city, he expressed both excitement and ambivalence about the next chapter ahead. He’d studied in a technical field and remains passionate about his work, even as uncertainties loom. “Some people,” he said with a hint of wistfulness in his voice, “say AI might make everyone in my graduating cohort obsolete within five years.” He was not wholly negative about the widespread changes AI may yet unleash in our daily lives, but, he said, he still felt “restless.”
I know a bit about what he’s feeling; most of my friends, family, and colleagues feel it too, in one way or another. I think it reflects both the real-time upheavals around us—whether technological, social, or economic—and an older, deeper restlessness which connects us all, as we seek out meaning and purpose; as we try to figure out who we really are, and what we’re meant to do on this Earth; as we consider the possibility of relationship with and through a God who is love.
On this Solemnity of All Saints, Matthew’s gospel brings us to a key moment in the Christian understanding of how to be human: Jesus teaching the beatitudes in what will become known as the sermon on the mount. As he entered more deeply into his public ministry, the gospel relays, Jesus “saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.”
In our era of dizzying advancement and technocratic mastery, the apparent paradoxes the beatitudes present might seem, to some, to be quaint.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.”
In 1949, in the wake of an earlier global upheaval emanating from the devastation and traumas of the Second World War, a young Trappist named Thomas Merton, living at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky wrote: “For me, to be a saint is to be myself.” Today, Pope Leo XIV reminds us that to be human is to be attentive: to care, to recognize the beauty (even, perhaps, the beatitudes) in our limitations.
In the days ahead, as we remember all those who lived before us—lives full of seemingly ordinary moments, made and known as extraordinary through our sacramental imaginations—let us take care to really take care of one another. “Reading stories to a child, offering company…rearranging a home so that it is welcoming”: all of these, Pope Leo writes in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence), are ever more crucial as the seductive forces of efficiency, automation, and powerthreaten to sever us from the ties that bind us together.
Both of today’s readings—from Revelation, and 1 John—hint at deeper realities and understandings to come in an opaque future. Let them come. Meanwhile, let us remember Mary and her Magnificat. In the wake of her visit with Elizabeth, Pope Leo reminds us, nothing immediately changes in Mary’s surroundings, when considering the social and political forces swirling around her; yet, within, “everything…changed, allowing her to see what is invisible.”
Let us notice, truly notice; let us remain, in the words of Pope Leo and in the spirit of Pope Francis and many others before him, “creatures embedded in a network of relationships with other living beings and with all of creation.” We will need one another—we’ll need the saintlike gift of real, undivided attention—for all the questions and challenges yet to emerge in our distracted age.
What is making you feel restless this week? As you reflect, try to take solace in the larger story we weave together across generations—and let us all remember, as St. Augustine did, that our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in you.
