Witness to Great Awakening: Homily for Thursday, May 28, 2026

Witness is the first step to faith. People are invited to consider a life of faith when they first see a witness or witnesses to that faith. Dominicans today celebrate St. Pier Giorgio, a young man known for charity. A compelling witness. Readings for Today.

Witness to Great Awakening

So the image I have of Pier Giorgio Frassati is probably the same as many. An athletic young man smoking a pipe on a mountain. We’ve had two young adult saints who have really caught the modern imagination. Pier Giorgio Frassati is one. An outdoorsman, rugged, holy, etc. Carlos Acutis is another. A teen who was very much a teen, played video games, but also very holy, brought his parents back to the church.

It strikes me that in that spirit, we need to understand what St. Paul is saying in the first reading. “Like newborn infants, long for pure spiritual milk.” You know, infants don’t know much. They have a lot of stress. We don’t think about baby stress, but every time I have prepared someone, parents, for baptism, I talk a lot about baby stress.

Because everything in the world is brand new. When they were in the womb, they didn’t have much to worry about. But once they’re born, well, they get hungry. They haven’t experienced hunger before. When they’re born, they experience going to the bathroom, which they didn’t have to worry about before. They experience being afraid, cold, sleepy. All those things they didn’t know anything about until they were born.

And just like us, anything that is unknown and brand new, it can often be accompanied by stress. Wondering if we’ll figure this out. I listened to a podcast once that described the phenomena that many who have had the experience of being around babies or raised your own children, where they’re sitting in their high chair, and they knock something off the high chair. The parent picks it up, puts it back, they knock it off again. The podcast was saying this was not just babies being difficult. They’re little scientists. They notice that this falls to the ground the first time, and wonder, will it happen the second time? And the third time? They repeat an experiment just like any good scientist.

But if we’re going to experience the spiritual life in this way, we need to be attentive to what inspires us, to what piques our curiosity, to what we want to know about Jesus and the faith. And oftentimes, if we’re not careful, we can focus so much on the ordinary parts of life that we miss what Paul is talking about in this first reading, the greatness of the call that we have received.

“Come to him a living stone.” “Let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own.” “Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.”

And this is the great promise that we’re called to share with a world that is so desperately calling out, just like Bartimaeus in the Gospel. Whether people fully realize it or not, many in our society today are calling out for something more than what they have. There’s an emptiness in them that sometimes they can’t even name, but is there. And it becomes important to us, in our own lives, to answer, or at least to invite people into that call of holiness.

It starts, quite simply, with just demonstrating that Christians are trustworthy people. It starts by demonstrating that we put our money where our mouth is. We actually do things to live out our faith. We help the poor. We reach out to those in need. We support those going through some kind of difficulty or hardship. But whatever it is, we provide the example, just like Pier Georgiot and Carlos Acutis and countless others, that there is something more to this life. And more importantly, there’s something more, much, much more, in the next life.

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