“Through the Eyes of Love” (1979) by Melissa Manchester

Lord My Chef Sunday Music by Fr. Nicanor F. Lalog II, 25 October 2026

Many people say love is blind but this Sunday’s gospel shows us how love can actually enable us to see better and clearer one another as brothers and sisters who must be loved and respected and cared for (https://lordmychef.com/2026/10/24/love-and-you-shall-see-2/).

And while preparing for our early morning Masses today, we just felt like humming the very lovely piano introduction to Melissa Manchester’s Through the Eyes of Love that was the theme of the 1978 movie Ice Castles starring Robby Benson and Lyn Holly-Johnson. One of their co-stars in that movie was Tom Skerritt who just died last Wednesday who played father to Johnson, an acctual former American figure skater.

In that romance movie, Benson and Johnson were high school sweethearts: he a hockey player while she, a figure skater. When she moved to another high school that offered her better options for her talent in figure skating, she met another man, dumping Benson in the process. They reunited after Johnson had a bad fall while practicing that left her partially blind; Benson took care of her, convincing her to practice anew to join a competition with him as her guide. Eventually she won in the competition with no one knowing her blindness until she tripped on the roses thrown at her by the fans after winning.

It is one of those unforgettable romantic movies we all fell in love with while in second year high school, especially its lovely theme sang by Manchester. Though it never became a hit, the song has endured all these years as one of the favorite songs in wedding receptions, often as the first dance of the couple. And why not with these realizations of someone who had experienced true love despite everything.

Please, don't let this feeling end
It's everything I am
Everything I want to be
I can see what's mine now
Finding out what's true since I found you
Looking through the eyes of love

Now, I can take the time
I can see my life
As it comes up shining now
Reaching out to touch you
I can feel so much since I found you
Looking through the eyes of love

When Jesus said in today’s gospel that the greatest and first commandment is to love God with all of our heart, and mind, and soul or total self and that the second is to love others as you love yourself, he also revealed to us one of the most profound truths we fail to recognize and even reject so often.

Our love for God and for others unfold first in us, in our love for our self. We cannot love God unless we love and accept who we are – whatever is good and bad in us. Many times, some of us hate ourselves that we change even our gender, manipulate our appearances, fantasize on so many what ifs and wishful thinkings.

The key to loving God totally is to first love our very self; Jesus became human like us to show us that is good to be human. It is only when we have come to embrace and accept wholly our gift of self can we give ourselves to God totally and to others. What I am to myself becomes what I am to others and vice versa. And together we all go to God as he comes to us—in love. Exactly how Johnson who had gone blind in the movie realized.

And now I do believe
That even in a storm
We'll find some light
Knowing you're beside me
I'm all right

Please, don't let this feeling end
It might not come again
And I want to remember
How it feels to touch you
How I feel so much since I found you
Looking through the eyes of love

Just like us in many instances, it is often in those trying moments we realize how much we are loved by God, never leaving us despite our many sins and failures. Imagine in this song Through the Eyes of Love Jesus is our beloved guiding us through our many blindness in life, enabling us to see persons and events in our lives more clearly that we succeed and most of all, become fruitful and fulfilled. Have a blessed week ahead filled with love!