A pure heart sees what God is still creating.
By Fr Antony Parankimalil VC
The Lord gives us a promise through the prophet Isaiah that is stronger than every change we can see around us: “The mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed” (Isaiah 54:10). I am serving in Rwanda, a country known as the land of a thousand hills, and so this image speaks to me very powerfully. Even if someone could level one hill, there would still be nine hundred and ninety-nine remaining. Mountains appear permanent to us, yet God says that even if what seems most stable were to disappear, His steadfast love would remain.
We often measure God’s love by the present condition of our lives. When a child has stopped praying, a marriage is under strain, a family member is trapped in addiction, or someone we love has turned away from the Church, we begin to think that God has withdrawn. We imagine that His patience has ended because ours is nearly exhausted. But the covenant of God is not an ordinary contract. A contract may become null and void when one party fails to keep its conditions. God’s covenant reveals a different kind of faithfulness. “If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). Our failure is real and must be faced, but it does not turn God into someone unfaithful.
This is the foundation of everything I want to say. God has not moved one step backwards from the person for whom you are praying. His love has not diminished because that person is confused, angry, unbelieving or difficult. He continues to call, correct, wait and create a path of return. The question is whether we will learn to look at that person only through the pain of the present moment, or whether we will ask for a pure heart that can recognise what grace may still be forming.
A Pure Heart Sees the Saint in the Process
For many years I did not understand Saint Paul’s words to Titus: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure” (Titus 1:15). How can all things be pure when there is obvious sin, injustice and disorder in the world? I used to connect purity of heart mainly with extraordinary visions. Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8), and I thought of saints such as Margaret Mary Alacoque or Faustina, who received visions of the Lord. Later I understood that this promise also has a deeply practical meaning: the pure in heart begin to see the presence and purpose of God hidden within other human beings.
A pure heart does not become blind to evil. It does not call violence love, excuse betrayal, deny addiction or pretend that harmful conduct is acceptable. Purity gives us the grace to distinguish the sin from the person and the person’s present condition from the whole of the life God is still creating. We may see a child with autism or an intellectual disability and recognise not a burden but a beloved child of God. We may look at an alcoholic, an adulterer, a person who has committed grave wrong or a relative who has lost direction and still refuse to say that grace has no future for them. Where human judgement sees only the sinner, faith can see a saint in the process.
Think of Augustine as a young man. His life was disordered, his faith had been abandoned and his choices brought deep sorrow to his mother. Human judgement could have concluded that he was wasting his life and humiliating his family. Monica saw more. She did not approve his sin, but through prayer she continued to see the son whom God could reclaim. Saint Therese turned towards the Lord while still very young; Augustine came after many years of wandering; Nicholas of Flue entered the final and most radical stage of his vocation later in life. God does not use one timetable for every soul.
Jesus looked at people in this way throughout the Gospel. Others saw the Samaritan woman as an outcast, but He saw someone who could carry news of the Messiah to her town. People reduced Matthew to the corruption associated with tax collectors, but Jesus saw an apostle. Mary Magdalene was known through the darkness from which Christ had delivered her, but the risen Lord entrusted her with the announcement of the Resurrection. Jesus did not deny anyone’s past. He refused to make the past the final definition of the person.
When I was a child, my mother sometimes asked me to remove weeds from our courtyard. She knew how to motivate me: she promised that if I did the work, I would receive a gift. I believed her and pulled out the weeds, though I discovered that mothers sometimes give a larger promise than the gift that eventually appears. God is not like that. “God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19). What He has promised, He is able to fulfil.
Later my mother told me that some of the plants we had treated as weeds were being recognised as useful medicinal plants. We had called them useless because we did not understand what they carried. That memory helped me understand the parable of the wheat and the weeds. When the servants wanted to pull out the weeds, the master warned them that they might uproot the wheat at the same time, and he told them to allow both to grow until the harvest (Matthew 13:29-30). Sometimes what appears to us to be only a weed may be wheat that we have not yet learned to recognise. Final judgement belongs to God, who sees the whole field, the hidden root and the harvest that has not yet appeared.
This is why Jesus warns us not to judge and asks why we notice the speck in another person’s eye while ignoring the log in our own (Matthew 7:1-3). The warning is not a command to abandon truth, accountability or protection. There are situations in which wrongdoing must be named, vulnerable people must be defended and firm boundaries must be maintained. The warning is against taking the place of God and declaring that a person is beyond redemption. A pure heart can speak the truth about sin while still seeing the saint whom grace may bring forth.
God Can Rescue Those Who Seem Captive
Isaiah asks a question that many parents carry in their hearts: “Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of a tyrant be rescued?” The Lord answers, “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken, and the prey of the tyrant be rescued; for I will contend with those who contend with you, and I will save your children” (Isaiah 49:24-25). When a son or daughter is captive to alcohol, drugs, destructive relationships, violence or unbelief, the captivity can look stronger than every prayer. God does not ask us to pretend that the bondage is small. He asks whether we believe that it is greater than He is.
I remember a single mother who travelled from Mombasa to Nairobi for a retreat. She had sacrificed greatly to raise her only son, but he had become involved in drugs and alcohol, had abandoned his studies and faith, and had become so violent that she feared he might kill her. She asked how she could continue living in the same house. Her danger was real, and no mother in such a situation should be told that prayer means remaining without protection, treatment or practical help. At the same time, she did not want to surrender her son to hopelessness.
We asked her to pray with Isaiah 49:24-25 and to place her son under the intercession of Our Lady through the Memorare. She prayed the Scripture and the prayer faithfully for a month. Later the young man came to our prayer house and gave his own testimony that Jesus had called him to return. I tell this story as a testimony, not as a formula that gives us control over another person’s conversion or guarantees the same timetable in every family. Its message is that we must never treat a captive person as someone whom God cannot reach.
Jesus says, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27). Many people sitting in a church in Australia are already witnesses to things they once thought impossible. You may never have imagined that you would receive a visa, find work, establish a home in another country, marry, welcome a child or one day drive your own car. Yet doors opened, sometimes after long uncertainty. When I asked the congregation to raise their hands if God had already done something impossible in their lives, nearly every hand went up. I had to ask, with some humour, why people who had witnessed so much grace were still keeping such long faces.
One of the enemy’s most effective lies is to make us forget every grace already received. Murmuring says, “God has done nothing for me. He has forgotten me. He has rejected my family.” Isaiah says the opposite. The mountains may move, but His love has not moved. Perhaps we have stepped backwards in faith, but He has not withdrawn one step from us. Gratitude does not deny the present struggle; it remembers that the God who acted before has not lost His power.
Give God First Place
A mother once spoke to me about the confusion in her household. She had five children, but they were divided, ungrateful and unable to speak peacefully with one another. She could not understand how a family she had tried to hold together had become so fragmented. During prayer, the passage that came before us was Wisdom 14:22-27, which describes the disorder that follows when the knowledge of God is abandoned: confusion over what is good, forgetfulness of favours, faithlessness, impurity, disorder in marriage, deceit and violence.
The passage does not mean that every family difficulty can be explained by one simple spiritual cause, or that people who suffer have necessarily committed some hidden sin. It does reveal a serious principle. When the first commandment is displaced, another power takes God’s place. Idolatry is not limited to bowing before a statue. Money, status, power, occult practices, work, pleasure, resentment or the conviction that we can solve every problem without God can become functional idols. The heart was created to worship, and if it does not give first place to the Lord, something else will eventually demand that place.
Scripture tells the sick person to pray to the Lord and to turn away from sin (Sirach 38:9-10). The same chapter also honours physicians and medicine, so this cannot mean that a Christian should reject medical care or delay appropriate treatment. It means that God should not be the last person we consult, after every other resource has failed. We seek competent medical, psychological and practical help, but we also ask the Creator to search the heart, reveal what needs repentance and give wisdom to those caring for us.
I heard the testimony of a family whose four-year-old son suffered severe and persistent pain in his ear. They had sought medical care, but the cause remained unclear. The child’s father trusted greatly in science and money and resisted his wife’s request that he attend a retreat. Eventually he went. During the retreat, the preaching awakened his conscience, and he realised that he had not been to confession for more than twenty years. The family later testified that when he made his confession, a small dark object came from the child’s ear and the crying stopped. I cannot present a reported testimony as a universal medical explanation, and no one should conclude that unexplained illness is proof of personal sin. What the father understood was that his family needed more than money and argument; he himself needed reconciliation with God.
In Nairobi I met a man with serious kidney disease who asked how much money he should give me in order to receive healing. I told him that I was not the healer and that healing could not be purchased. Money is useful and necessary for many responsibilities, but there are things it cannot buy. It cannot manufacture peace, create a faithful marriage, restore a wounded conscience or guarantee that a family will remain united. When money becomes our only answer, we eventually discover that it is a servant we have turned into a master.
I have met very hardworking people in Europe, America and Australia, and I respect the sacrifices made to support a family. Yet some people work at two or three jobs and leave no time for prayer, rest, health or the people for whom they claim to be working. We must ask a simple question: after making all this money, if we destroy our health and lose our family relationships, who will enjoy what we have earned? Work is a gift and responsibility, but it cannot be allowed to remove God, family and the care of the person who is doing the work.
Parents pass to their children far more than property. Whenever I pray, I often kneel and sometimes lift my hands. A priest who had served with me in Nairobi once visited my parents in India. When he returned, he laughed and told me, “Antony, now I understand. You are a photocopy of your father.” He had seen my father kneel, lift his hands and pray in the same way. I had not deliberately copied him, and when I was younger I might even have wanted to be different from him, but his prayer had entered me without my realising it.
If I am a priest today, it is because my parents gave God priority and taught me to pray through the way they lived. The greatest gift parents can give their children is not a new car, a house, a degree or an inheritance. Those things may be helpful, but without a living relationship with God they cannot hold a soul steady. If we have given our children everything except God, we have withheld the gift that gives every other gift its proper place.
Become the Holy Root
Saint Paul writes, “If the root is holy, then the branches also are holy” (Romans 11:16). We are very quick to ask why our husband, wife, child, parent or relative has not changed. The Word asks a different question: are you willing to become the holy root in your family? You may not be able to control another person’s decisions, but your repentance, fidelity, prayer and witness can change the spiritual atmosphere in which those decisions are made.
Saint Monica could not force Augustine to believe. She could not argue him into holiness or make his choices for him. She became a holy root through years of prayer, tears and perseverance, and grace worked through that fidelity. Zacchaeus encountered Jesus and heard that salvation had come to his house (Luke 19:9). The Philippian jailer was told, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household” (Acts 16:31). These passages do not erase the freedom of every family member or promise automatic conversion without personal response. They reveal that God does not look at one believer in isolation. He sees the relationships, generations and branches connected to that life.
This is why one faithful person should never underestimate his or her place in a household. A praying mother, a repentant father, a young person who refuses dishonesty, a grandmother who blesses her grandchildren, or a spouse who continues to worship without condemning the other can become an opening through which grace enters. The world may call that person small and powerless. God sees a root.
Jeremiah records the Lord searching Jerusalem for even one person who acts justly and seeks truth so that the city might receive mercy (Jeremiah 5:1). The heart of God is so large that He looks for one person through whom blessing can begin. When one Jacqueline, one Monica, one father, one priest or one young person seeks Him sincerely, that faith is not confined to a private corner. It becomes intercession for a family, a parish, a city and a nation.
The holy root does not become self-righteous. Holiness that produces contempt is not the holiness of Christ. The person who stands before God for a family must resist the temptation to keep a record of everyone else’s failures. We do not become holy by announcing that we are better than the branches. We become holy by allowing Christ to cleanse our own hearts, correct our conduct and make our lives available for the good of others.
Stand in the Breach
Through the prophet Ezekiel, God says, “I sought for anyone among them who would repair the wall and stand in the breach before me on behalf of the land” (Ezekiel 22:30). A breach is the broken place through which destruction enters. Intercession means standing before God in that broken place. Instead of merely discussing a relative’s failures, we carry the person into prayer. Instead of using suffering to accuse God or one another, we ask whether even what we did not choose can be united with Christ and offered in love.
I met a mother in a wheelchair who was living with advanced and very painful cancer. She came asking for prayer for healing, but she also carried a deeper wound: her children were divided, her family was shattered and the unity she had tried to build had disappeared. During prayer, she was invited to place not only her desire for healing but also her unavoidable suffering before the Lord for the conversion and reconciliation of her family and for the salvation of souls.
Christian faith does not teach that cancer is good, that medical treatment should be refused or that God sends illness as a simple punishment. We should pray for healing and receive appropriate care. Yet suffering that cannot immediately be removed need not become meaningless. United with the suffering of Christ, it can become intercession. This is not a commercial bargain in which pain purchases grace. It is an act of love in which a person says, “Lord, do not allow even this sorrow to be wasted. Receive it with the prayer I make for those I love.”
Standing in the breach begins with surrender, but it also requires repentance. During the retreat we prayed, “Change my heart, O God.” It is easy to ask the Lord to change our children, our spouse, our parish or our nation while protecting our own habits from His light. The intercessor must first become available to the grace being requested for others. If I am changed, my family receives a different person. If I am converted, the prayer I offer for my nation is no longer separated from the life I live.
Reconcile While There Is Still Time
After the guided prayer, the Lord brought us to a final word: “We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up. But God will not take away a life; he will devise plans so as not to keep an outcast banished forever from his presence” (2 Samuel 14:14). Water poured onto the ground cannot simply be gathered back into the vessel. There are opportunities that pass. After death we cannot make the telephone call, apologise for the wound, return what was taken or speak the word of affection we kept postponing.
David was called a man after God’s own heart, not because his life was without grave sin, but because he could be humbled, repent and return. God devises a way so that the outcast need not remain banished forever. We are asked to share that heart. Perhaps you have been hurt by a spouse, former spouse, parent, child, sibling, neighbour, employer or friend. Perhaps money was never repaid or trust was broken. Forgiveness does not mean denying justice, abandoning necessary boundaries or returning to immediate danger. In situations involving abuse, violence or serious risk, reconciliation must never be used to remove protection. But we must also be honest about the relationships in which pride, resentment or the fear of saying sorry has become the real barrier.
I have sometimes been shocked to meet powerful intercessors who pray for the whole world but remain unable to speak to their own siblings, spouse or children. The enemy is a deceiver. He allows us to feel spiritually important while a wound inside our own home remains untouched. We may spend hours speaking with people who already affirm us while giving less than a minute to the father, mother, brother or sister from whom we have become estranged.
I therefore gave the congregation a practical exercise. Pray first. Pray ten Hail Marys and ask for grace, because a telephone call made in anger may deepen the wound. Then, where contact is safe and responsible, speak to the person with whom communication has broken down. Do not begin with an accusation. Say, “I am sorry. Forgive me. Bless me. I do not want this separation to remain forever.” You may not receive the response you hoped for, and reconciliation cannot be forced by one person. Yet humility touches the heart of God and frees us from protecting hatred as though it were a treasure.
My dear brothers and sisters, a pure heart sees differently because it has first allowed God to change it. It trusts the covenant love that does not withdraw. It sees wheat where others see only weeds, and a saint in the process where others see only a sinner. It believes that captives can be rescued, gives God first place, becomes a holy root, stands in the breach and seeks reconciliation while there is still time.
God can change anyone. The first person I must place before Him is myself. “Change my heart, O God. Make it ever true. Change my heart, O God. May I be like you.”
Pastoral note: Prayer, confession and spiritual discernment should accompany, not replace, appropriate medical, psychological, safeguarding or legal assistance. Reported healing testimonies should not be used to diagnose illness or to delay medical care. Forgiveness and reconciliation do not require remaining in immediate danger, removing necessary protective boundaries or abandoning a legitimate pursuit of truth and justice.
Adapted and edited from Day Retreat Session One, delivered by Fr Antony Parankimalil VC at Holy Family Church, Doveton, during the July 2026 Divine Australia programme.