Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an

apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization using media both old and

new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with

Christ and His Church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring

the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite

you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the

warmth and light of Christ with each one of us. Peace be with you. Friends, one of

my favorite movies is now I suppose a oldie but golden. I'm talking about close

encounters of the third kind, one of Stephen Spielberg's early masterpieces.

Maybe some of my listeners will remember there was a kind of UFO alien craze

back in the 1970s and it produced all kinds of crackpot books and movies and

stuff but Spielberg's movie I think was different because even though it was

about aliens the arrival of space people and all this it spoke I think some

truly universal spiritual themes. You might recall the plot some very ordinary

people are visited by spacecraft from another world. They see marvelous things

and then they're physically marked by the light that comes from the spacecraft

but even more deeply it becomes apparent. They are psychologically and spiritually

marked because they all begin to feel a compulsion to come to this place that

they don't really know. They know that somewhere they have to go and they've

got a very incoherent indefinite sense of it and the obsession begins to grow

in them. They even begin to imagine and then artistically to reproduce this

place that they're seeing in their in their mind's eye. It looks something like a

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