In other words, says Abbot Bernard, if you're not concerned that your heart might become hard, it already is. A hardened heart is a big problem for a leader in any context, but it will utterly derail any hope of being able to clearly hear and do the will of God.

If you come at the Bible as if it's a document of encyclopedic information, you've pretty much killed any kind of life change in a seeker and unbeliever.

they have ears, but cannot hear

Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go.

Unheard silence does not necessarily mean the death of the player. Unheard silence is not the loss of listeners for that voice. It is an evil when the drama of a life does not continue in others for reason of their deafness, or ignorance.

The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ.

All the preaching in the world cannot make a man see the truth so long as his eyes are blinded.

Nothing so hardens the heart of man as a barren familiarity with sacred things.

Not even God can teach a man who comes to the Bible with his mind made up.

This inability may be grounded in an inborn dull-mindedness (in the literal sense), or in a general indifference developed in the course of a lifetime, or finally, in an insensitivity to certain impressions as a result of repeatedly ignoring them.

You'd have a better chance persuading someone to change their sexual orientation than reaching people who have rendered themselves so deaf and blind.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.