From Fracture to Divine Opening

There are days when the fractures in the world feel like a map of our own interior life; lines of division running through families, institutions, even within a single heart. Today’s readings hold together two movements that meet precisely at those lines: a sobering account of division, and a tender act of divine opening. In the first reading, a cloak is torn and a nation splits. In the Gospel, a man’s ears and tongue are opened, and a community can suddenly hear and be heard. Between those scenes, the Psalm gives God’s own lament: “If only my people would hear me.” The thread is unmistakable. Where God’s voice is ignored, things fall apart. Where the Word is received, what is closed is opened, what is tangled is made plain.

When a Cloak Tears: The Cost of Following Our Own Counsel

Ahijah’s tearing of the cloak into twelve pieces and the prophetic handing over of ten to Jeroboam dramatize more than a political event. It reveals what idolatry does to a people. Solomon’s compromises; small at first, then structural; become a nation’s wound. The text says Israel’s rebellion “is to this day,” implying that the spiritual logic of division has a long half-life.

It is tempting to keep this story safely in the past, but the pattern is painfully current. Whenever the heart entertains “strange gods”; success without Sabbath, productivity without prayer, ideology without truth, romance without fidelity; the fabric of communion thins. Homes become camps. Parishes form factions. Online, we curate counsel to mirror our desires and call the echo wisdom. Scripture names this pattern bluntly: “They walked according to their own counsels.” The consequence is not only personal confusion; it is communal fracture.

And yet, even in judgment, God preserves a thread for David’s sake. A torn cloak is not the end of the story. God holds to His promises even when we loosen our grip on Him. The remnant is a quiet pledge: history may bend under human sin, but it will not break God’s fidelity.

“Hear My Voice”: The Divine Lament and the Promise of Freedom

Psalm 81 is not a scold; it is a heartbreak. God’s command to avoid strange gods is not the jealousy of a rival lover; it is the care of a Creator who knows what deforms His creatures. “If only my people would hear me… quickly would I humble their enemies.” Notice the ordering. Liberation follows listening. We long for God to handle our adversaries; external pressures, inner compulsions, cultural headwinds; yet the Psalm insists that the shortest route to freedom runs through obedience.

In a culture that prizes autonomy, “obedience” can sound like surrendering agency. In fact, it is the recovery of agency under God. To obey is not to shrink; it is to be rightly aligned so that strength is spent where it blesses, not where it burns.

A practical question surfaces: Whose voice most shapes the day? The metric is simple and searching. What gets first and last word; notifications or the Name? Counsel that hardens the heart has a feel: it flatters, it accelerates, it inoculates against repentance. Counsel from God humbles and steadies; it convicts and consoles in the same breath.

“Ephphatha”: The Word That Touches What Is Closed

In the Gospel, Jesus travels through Gentile lands and meets a man whose deafness has tangled his speech. Christ does not offer a distant fix. He touches the places of need; ears, tongue; groans with the sorrow of a world not as it should be, looks to the Father, and speaks a single Aramaic word: “Ephphatha; Be opened.”

Note the intimacy. No one is reduced to a spectacle. Healing happens away from the crowd. The Son’s authority arrives as tenderness, not theater. The Word made flesh uses earthy signs; fingers, spittle; as if to say: grace will travel the ordinary paths of your humanity. This is not a comment on the dignity or value of those who are deaf or non-speaking; their lives already bear the full image of God. The miracle is a sign of the Kingdom’s nearness: in Christ, creation begins to be set right, and communion; hearing and being heard; becomes newly possible.

The Church treasures this moment so deeply that it echoes in the baptismal “Ephphatha” rite: may the Lord soon touch your ears to receive His Word, and your mouth to proclaim it. Baptism opens. But life has a way of closing. Anxiety packs the ears with static. Cynicism knots the tongue. Resentment builds scar tissue around the heart. We need this Word again and again.

Not Performance, but Witness

Jesus orders silence. The crowd proclaims anyway. The tension is instructive. There is a kind of speech about God that becomes a substitute for intimacy with God. There is also a holy compulsion: when mercy has reached the marrow, words come as overflow, not strategy.

In an age of performance, the line is thin. Faith easily becomes content, and people become platforms. The Lord’s pattern remains quietly subversive: He takes the person aside, heals in privacy, and sends them back into ordinary life where praise can rise without self-promotion. The most credible witness is still the simplest: a life once closed now opened; speech once tangled now truthful; love once guarded now given.

Practicing Ephphatha in a Noisy World

Openings rarely happen by accident. They are graces we can dispose ourselves to receive. A few practices help:

• Make room for first-Word listening. Begin and end the day with two or three minutes of unhurried silence, followed by a short Psalm or Gospel line. Let God set the frame.
• Name the strange gods. Which altars get daily offerings; phones, performance, resentment, image, ideology? Fasting from one of these, even for a short window, exposes how much sway it holds.
• Prefer proximity over projection. Like Jesus, step aside with the person in front of you. Listen before solving. Let compassion be felt before truth is said.
• Seek the sacramental touch. In Confession, the Lord’s “Be opened” clears the passage between hearing and speaking by mercy. Old knots loosen where grace is allowed to enter.
• Choose words that mend. Each day, offer one word of blessing, one apology, and one intercession spoken aloud. Praise, repentance, and petition retrain the tongue toward life.

Hope for a Fractured Time

The torn cloak is not the final garment of God’s people. In Christ; the Son of David who walks even into Gentile territory; God is stitching a new humanity. The one who opens ears and loosens tongues also reconciles enemies and gathers scattered tribes. Division is real, but it is not ultimate. The Church is meant to be the place where this new speech is learned: not slogans, but truth in love; not noise, but praise; not contempt, but intercession.

The Psalm’s promise remains: if we would hear, God would act “quickly.” The speed, however, belongs to God’s wisdom, not ours. He humbles enemies by converting them, and sometimes by converting us to see that the enemy we fought was our own hardness of heart. The victory of the Lamb is not a crushing; it is an opening.

May the Lord speak His word over everything in us that has closed; over the parts that fear, that defend, that lash out, that grow numb. May He touch our ears to receive, our tongues to bless, our hearts to obey. And may a fractured world glimpse, through a people newly attentive and newly articulate in love, the One who “has done all things well.”