My mother grew up in a small town in South Jersey, named Pitman, not far from Philadelphia. It was the kind of place you passed through on your way to someplace else. It was pretty unremarkable – there was a Main Street, called Broadway, with a few stores, a bank, a movie theater and a bakery. It was settled by devout Methodists. My mother grew up attending camp meetings and carrying a small, well-thumbed bible to services on Sunday, the kind of bible that had Jesus’s words printed in red ink.

Like a lot of small towns, it had its own culture, and its own way of looking at the world. Everybody knew everybody – and everybody’s business. I know it caused my mother pain. Her parents, my grandparents, ended up divorcing when she was a teenager. This was in the 1930s, at a time when divorce was still considered scandalous and rare. Years later, when she spoke of her hometown, my mother was not always kind.

“It was a good place to be from,” she’d say – implying that she couldn’t imagine spending her whole life there.

After hearing today’s gospel, I can’t help but wonder if Jesus ever felt that way about Nazareth.

In Mark’s telling of this event, Jesus returns to his hometown – another place where everybody knew everybody and everybody’s business. He finds people who dismiss him as merely a carpenter, Mary’s son, someone who couldn’t possibly be capable of greatness. They can’t understand how someone like that could have such power and wisdom. And we’re told that Jesus was amazed at just one thing: their lack of faith.

Faith.

We’ve been hearing that word a lot lately, haven’t we?

Two weeks ago, when Christ confronted the storm at sea, he asked his disciples, “Do you not yet have faith?”

Last week, he marveled at the woman who touched his garment and told her, “Your faith has saved you.” Moments later, he said to the synagogue official whose daughter had died, “Just have faith.”

But this week, it isn’t the power of faith that makes the biggest impression.

It is the absence of it.

We live in an age when faith is often absent. Last week, there was an item in the New York Times, asking readers to define faith. They got thousands of responses, ranging from the secular to the sacred, from the disbelieving to the devout. A lot of them were discouraging and took a cynical view of any kind of belief. I was reminded of the words of the great lay leader Catherine Doherty: “Faith walks simply, childlike, between the darkness of human life and the hope of what is to come.”

That kind of childlike wonder may have been something the people of Nazareth just couldn’t accept.

And faith, ultimately, requires acceptance. It is a gift – freely offered from a loving and generous God.

But it is a gift many of us reject.

According to polls, only about a quarter of Catholics attend mass every Sunday. Fewer Catholics are getting married in church. Fewer still are celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation. Many don’t believe in the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. The mystery and beauty of the faith that binds us together — that defines our values and that ultimately saves our souls — are all becoming lost.

Too many of us are living in our own Nazareth, blind to the great gift before us.

Do we realize what we have been given?

Do we understand it?

Do we see the wonder before us?

Do we believe it?

Do we even want to?

Because wanting to – that is the very beginning of faith.

And faith, once accepted and embraced, yields extraordinary dividends. It helps us to understand how God works in our lives. It lets us see the world through different eyes.

Eyes that can see with tenderness and hope.

Eyes that can see a carpenter as a king.

Thinking about all this, and what Jesus encountered when he returned to his village, I went back to one of the greatest accounts of small town life, Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” It never fails to break my heart.

In the beginning, the stage manager who is narrating the story of life in Grover’s Corners describes it this way: “Nice town,” he says. “Nobody very remarkable ever come out of it, s’far as we know.”

But what you find as the play unfolds is that everyone is remarkable. Every blessed person in the town. But nobody living there realizes that. And in the final scene, in the graveyard, one of the dead says of the living, with sorrow and regret, “They don’t understand.”

So many of us don’t.

Whether it’s Grover’s Corners, or Pitman, New Jersey, or Queens, or Nazareth.

We tend to see with the hard eyes of the world, and not with the eyes of faith. We see only what is — not what can be.

This weekend, we celebrate a great holiday that exists, really, because men and women 233 years ago saw what could be.

They had faith. Faith in the future. Faith in their ideals. Faith in the God who created them.

As we are reminded of their courage and sacrifice, let us also be reminded of their faith – and pray that we, too, might be moved to see the world differently.

To see in Jesus not just a carpenter, but a king.

To see in the host not just bread, but God.

To see in one another God’s continuing spark of creation.

To see, above all, possibility.

To do that, I believe, is to see the world as God intended.

It is to see … quite simply … with the eyes of faith.