“When there is great love there are always miracles. One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are. I see you through my affection for you. The miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”
~Father Vaillant to Bishop LaTour in a discussion about the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Willa Cather’s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
In your notebook, reflect on Father Vaillant’s assertion that a miraculous apparition “is human vision corrected by divine love,” and that loves makes our perception “finer.” Could it be true that the physical world we see around us every day is distorted and inaccurate because we perceive it without aid of divine love? What difference does great love make in the way we see the world?