This October, I’m excited to welcome a remarkable guest whose work has helped countless souls all over the world rediscover the splendor hidden within the Christian vision of the human person. Internationally known Catholic speaker and author Christopher West, perhaps the most beloved popular interpreter of the teachings of St. John Paul II on the Theology of the Body, will come to share anew the good news of why God created us male and female, and why the Church, so often misunderstood, speaks not to imprison the human heart, but to set it free. The event here at our parish is called “The Well”, named after that famous pivotal encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

For we live in an age overflowing with information yet starving for meaning; an age that has taught many to look upon the body with confusion, suspicion, or even despair. Yet Christ does not leave us wandering in that fog. He reveals a path toward freedom, toward wholeness, toward the rediscovery of what it means to be truly human.

And perhaps this raises a deeper question – why does Jesus seek us out? 

Imagine, for a moment, the eyes of Jesus fixed upon you. What do you see there? Why does His gaze unsettle us? We know the strange discomfort of holding the gaze of another person too long — the uncertainty of what lies hidden behind their eyes, whether judgment or affection, indifference or intimacy. Yet Christ’s gaze is unlike any other. He looks upon us fully, without turning away. Not merely at our virtues, but at our wounds; not merely at the face we present to the world, but at the soul beneath it.

This Sunday the Church celebrates Holy Trinity Sunday, this strange and bewildering teaching that God is an eternal relationship at his very core and wants us to share in it. The heart of Christianity is not merely that man seeks God, but that God Himself has gone in search of man. From all eternity the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have lived in a boundless communion of love, lacking nothing, needing nothing, yet desiring to share that divine life with us. And so the Son stepped down into the dark forest of our world, clothed Himself in our humanity, and walked our dusty roads that we might be drawn into the very life of the Trinity. Christ does not simply come to improve us morally, but to bring us home, to gather wandering souls into the blazing circle of divine love where the Father delights in the Son, and the Spirit binds all together in eternal joy. The Gospel, then, is the astonishing invitation that frail creatures like ourselves might one day participate in the very communion of God. That is why Jesus went to that well and encountered that woman. That is why Jesus looks intensely at each one of us.