Tag: <span>Healing</span>

June 26, 2021June 25, 2021

Letting God

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Why is it so hard simply to believe that God will keep his word?

Today’s readings are all about faith. We see some examples of people who are slow to believe. In the first reading, Sarah chuckles in disbelief as the messengers of God predict her childbirth. In the gospel, Jesus refers to those of the house of Israel who lack faith.

But we also see examples of great faith and trust. Abraham’s faith wins him great blessings from God, and the centurion in the gospel–notably not one of God’s people, not an Israelite–demonstrates not only great humility before Christ in declaring his unworthiness to receive Him, but also great faith and trust that Jesus can cure his servant without even being physically present.

And in both of these readings, the strong faith of one benefits others. Abraham’s faith wins for him the blessing of a son–and the same blessing even for his disbelieving wife Sarah. In the gospel, the centurion’s faith wins the salvation of his servant from paralysis.

Heroic faith casts a broad glow; it illuminates and benefits the lives of others, who may not possess such faith.

But again, why is it so hard simply to believe that God will keep his word? Why do we so often fail to demonstrate the faith of Abraham, and fail to bring God’s blessings upon us, like the centurion?

It runs fully against our nature to place our understanding of the protagonist role in our lives in God, rather than ourselves. We so dearly want to achieve accomplishments that we can be proud of, and conversely, how ashamed we are of our shortcomings and failures. Also, we are embittered by other humans’ lack of love, to the point that the bitterness blurs our view of God’s infinite love

Faith requires a radical shift of mentality. It is not about our accomplishments; it is about what God can do and wants to do, and indeed has already done in us. It is not about our failures; it is about our lives offered to Him daily as a gift, with all their foibles and warts. It is not about others’ mistreatment of us; it is about God’s tender care for us.

Those who realize this mentality shift in their lives attain limitless blessings from God, in this life and eternity.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus for the only thing He asks of you: Trust. Ask Him to fill your life with the certainty expressed in Mary’s Magnificat, which becomes the psalm response for today: The Lord has remembered his mercy.

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June 25, 2021June 24, 2021

Light in Darkness

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

The entire history of salvation consists in God’s action to undo, with the most delicate respect for man’s freedom, the damage that man has done to himself through sin.

In today’s readings, we see God reversing physical maladies introduced into the world with original sin: infertility in the case of Sarah in the first reading, and leprosy in the gospel.

And the joy this brings is represented in the psalm: “See how the Lord blesses those who fear him.”

But in the end, all of this presages and culminates in Jesus’ act to reverse the greatest damage of all done by sin: the inability of the human being to enter into a relationship of loving intimacy with God the Father.

It may frustrate us sometimes that so many maladies still exist in the world; that with His coming, Jesus did not reverse them all at once. But the fact that He did not perform a complete overhaul of this sort with His coming reflects His respect for our original, fundamental choice.

He did, however, completely overturn the limitation of our freedom to choose good, in particular the ultimate good of a relationship with God, that we had imposed upon ourselves with original sin. He threw the door to God back open for us. And while we cannot avoid every suffering that comes to us from this broken world, with His help we can thoroughly and completely choose to enter into that relationship, with all the interior light and joy that this brings–to the point that our sufferings begin to take on a very relative importance.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that you trust in God’s providential plan for the world and for you, and that you trust the approach to salvation that He has chosen. Ask Him to fill you to bursting with all the fruits of His redemption.

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April 7, 2021March 18, 2021

Anticipation

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

There is something beautiful and exciting about anticipation.

Peter told the cripple in today’s first reading, “Look at us.” The man looked at them, full of excited anticipation, thinking that he was going to receive alms, perhaps something generous, given Peter’s response to him. What he received exceeded his wildest expectations–he immediately experienced strength in his limbs, and the ability to walk. He was fully cured.

It is interesting to note that the man did not expect this. In the gospels, the people whom Jesus cures seem always to expect it, to see it coming. To cure is a native trait, as it were, of Jesus. It is simply something that He does; in a sense, something that He is.

Not so for the disciples. They are mere creatures, with the same human limitations that we all endure. But the Holy Spirit gives them the divine power to accomplish what He asks of them, when He asks it of them. It is a borrowed power, in a sense; not native. But this is what makes our role as Christians, with all our humanity and limitations, particularly exciting. God will not hesitate to “lend” us the power, not to do what we think good, but to do specifically what He asks of us through promptings of the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, there is something beautiful and exciting about anticipation. We see it in today’s gospel, too. As Jesus explains the fulfillment of the Scriptures in the life of the Messiah, the disciples feel a burning excitement of anticipation. They don’t know what’s coming. But they can sense it is something spectacular having to do with Jesus. Even when He is revealed to them in the breaking of the bread, they are left in a state of excited anticipation, as He is immediately removed from their presence, in the most mysterious way.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to fill you with the joy, not of glorious enjoyment, but of anticipation that comes with the Resurrection. Ask Him to apply that excitement to everything that forms part of your life, the highs and the lows–all of which are filled with the promise of your own resurrection from death, and opportunity to offer your life for the resurrection to life of your fellow humans.

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March 23, 2021March 4, 2021

Restored in the Desert

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Do we not sympathize with the Israelites in today’s first reading–even a little?

They were wandering around in the desert, and even though God was providing for them, the food they had to eat was anything but sumptuous. They kept complaining, God kept punishing them, and they had an overall difficult time of it. Even today’s reading simply speaks of “their patience worn out by the journey.”

God loved His people, but He held them to a high standard of trust and obedience. He was not about to accept complaining or disobedience, much less idolatry. Their exile was not a fruit of weakness on His part or any lack of love, but of their own sin.

Yet, God continually sends signs of His love and manifestations of His Providence. Manna, quail, water from a rock, and in today’s reading, a miraculous bronze serpent that heals their wounds.

And ultimately, He sends His Son to save them, and us. As we see in the gospel of today, Jesus, the great I AM, is the one who is ultimately lifted up, like the bronze serpent, for our salvation.

God doesn’t love the Israelites only when they “behave”; He loves them when they sin. He corrects them, but He constantly sends the means to save them from their own gaffes.

And that’s what Jesus is for us. He did not come to save us because for the most part we were good, but made some mistakes along the way. He came because we performed authentic evil, but He loved us and loves us anyway; we degrade ourselves, and He restores our dignity.

Let us cling to Him, and not some belief in our own goodness and virtue, as that which restores and ensures this dignity ongoing.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Tell Jesus that you are deeply sorrowful for offending Him with your sin, and also, yes, for the degradation it has brought you. Tell Him that it is His ongoing, constantly ongoing restoration of your dignity that you trust, even when you are at your lowest. Ask Him never to let you be parted from Him.

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March 16, 2021February 26, 2021

Cleansing Water

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

Imagine being ill for thirty-eight years, like the man in today’s gospel.

He was at the pool called Bethesda, trying to get in when the water was stirred up, in a vague hope of receiving healing. But this was ordinary water, without healing powers.

Little did he know that Jesus had come by for him–Jesus, the source of living water (cf. Jn. 4:10).

The water that Jesus brings, which in a single moment fully cured the man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, is that which is represented by the pure, fresh river in today’s first reading. This living water, which purifies and cleanses the brackish water with which it comes into contact, is the grace of God.

And what is that grace? It is the Holy Spirit Himself, but seen specifically through the prism of the impact that He has on our bodies and especially our spirits.

He stands back and respects us when we resist Him. But when we open our hearts to Him fully and welcome Him, bid Him come in, He works miracles of joyful cleansing within our hearts.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: In this Lent, as you struggle to work on your conversion like the man struggling to enter the Bethesda pool, ask Jesus to send His cleansing Spirit into your heart to perform in a moment what all your struggles cannot bring to completion: The purification of your heart, and therefrom, its return to full life in Him.

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March 15, 2021February 26, 2021

Dancing

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

When He finds it in a human heart, true, pure love is a fulcrum that God uses to shower His grace. In this sense, there is an insight in so many merely human allegories, such as the Disney movie Frozen, that emphasize pure, self-sacrificing love. This insight can be found even in some secular idealism of our time that stresses authentic concern for the welfare, even the temporal welfare, of others.

The first reading talks about God turning weeping into dancing, creating a new Jerusalem where there will be no more suffering. The reading foreshadows the eternal life that Christ wins for us on the Cross.

In the gospel, Jesus brings the message of the first reading to life, as He turns the royal official’s mourning into dancing. The official asks Jesus to come and heal his son, who is near death. Jesus accuses the man of looking for a sign, but rather than defending himself, the man ignores the accusation entirely and insists that his son be saved.

The man is focused entirely on the welfare of the object of his love, his son. He will not be distracted by questions to his motives.

Jesus does not go with the man, but assures him that his child will live. Instead of growing angry with Jesus, the man is inspired to faith in His words–and He returns home, in the spirit of that faith.

The official’s faith is rewarded with the life and health of his son. His mourning is turned into dancing.

We have every opportunity to gain a foretaste of the dancing to come in heaven here on earth, if we wish; all we need do is beg God’s Providence, full of faith, to look after our welfare in every way, and then trust Him to do so, even when the means we foresee are not those He chooses.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to take over your life and do things His way. Tell Him you trust His plan to be the right one, and beg Him in His Providence to take over the direction of your life and the lives of your loved ones.

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February 20, 2021February 4, 2021

The Great Physician

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

In today’s first reading, God is not reproving His people for their sins, as He sometimes does. Rather, He is offering them hope as He calls them to conversion–hope for full restoration.

And it will come to light that this hope has a name: It is Jesus Christ. Jesus, the great Physician whom we see in today’s gospel.

It is beautiful to abandon our sins wholly, over and over again, in the sacrament of confession, thus exposing our wounds to this great Physician and allowing Him to do the work that He came to do.

Of course, the placement of these readings in Lent is no accident–it is the season of conversion.

It is interesting to reflect that, in addition to our sins, we have our simple human weaknesses. Maybe we struggle with attention span. Perhaps we don’t have as much energy for the day as we would like, or the kind of mental abilities we would like for planning and analyzing. These weaknesses can discourage us sometimes as much as our sins. People can be cruel by forming judgements of us only based on our weaknesses.

Jesus didn’t come to make us different from what we are; He didn’t come to make us good at everything. But what He does promise is that He loves us as we are, as His Father has created us. He loves us with our strengths, and with our weaknesses.

And we know that this love transforms us to participate in the divine nature itself, without taking away the particularities of our human nature, or of our own individual nature.

In the act of loving us, Jesus makes our strengths twice as valuable, and our weaknesses unimportant, as frustrating as they may sometimes be. His love itself transforms the value that we bring to the welfare of others into something beyond measure.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Consider the weaknesses that most frustrate you. Tell Jesus that you give them to Him, and ask Him to make your life valuable for His Kingdom in spite of them–with full trust and confidence that He will do so, beyond your imaginings. Then, ask Him forgiveness for the ways you neglect and offend Him in sin, and trust there too that the great Physician heals you.

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February 14, 2021February 16, 2021

The Leper

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

As so often happens with biblical readings, those of today are both history and allegory.

Moses was told what to do with lepers. They were to be proclaimed as unclean, and cast outside the Israelite camp. Here we see an image of the ejection of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, after their sin. All disease and uncleanliness came into the world with original sin–and more importantly, with sin, we were ostracized from the easy friendship with God that Adam and Eve enjoyed.

But with Christ, all that changes. In the gospel we see how. Simply, Jesus cures the leper. He leaves him clean, without blemish. The leper is told to keep it to himself, but he is exploding with joy. Everywhere he goes, he proclaims what God has done for him.

We must be realistic. With His death and Resurrection, Jesus did not remove all pain, suffering, and disease from Christians. With all the healing He did in life, we might have expected this to occur through the power of His Resurrection–but He did not come to overthrow Adam by utterly reversing the consequences of original sin. He came to rescue Adam, by opening for him–and us–again the door to life that Adam had closed.

But nonetheless, the time of salvation is now. Christ is healer, in our lives, now. If we gamble all on Him, if we make our relationship with Him our top priority, He will remove misery from our lives and put happiness in its place. It is not that we will have nothing to endure; what we do endure, we will bear full of His peace and joy, until that time when all suffering ends and we are united with Him forever in Heaven.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Ask Jesus to come and heal your heart. To heal it of all the scars left by abuse you have received. To heal it from its attachments to sin. And then, to transform it into a catalyst for the healing of others.

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January 23, 2021January 13, 2021

Underrated

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

There is a humorous contrast of one element of today’s Scripture passages relative to all the rest. It is not the first reading, which speaks of the wonderful effectiveness of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the one eternal High Priest. It is not the psalm, which celebrates the entry of that High Priest into His glory.

It is not the gathering of the crowd in the gospel, clamoring to get close to Jesus, the great healer, who as High Priest saves people even from their physical illnesses.

Rather, it is that last line in the gospel, where Jesus’ relatives try to seize Him because they think He is “out of His mind.”

Have you ever felt misunderstood? Have you seen your good intentions misinterpreted? You are in good company.

The King of Splendor, the great High Priest whose entire human existence was focused on the unmerited salvation of mankind, found himself considered to be nuts, by His own family members.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: Jesus’ entire sojourn on earth was continuously filled with the misunderstanding and scorn of lesser hearts and minds. Think of times when you have been misunderstood, or slighted. Offer to Jesus those moments, past, present and future, as part of your overall gift of self to Him. Ask Him to transform you by His saving grace into a person who can contribute through your self-offering to His saving mission.

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January 21, 2021January 12, 2021

The Center of It All

This is a reflection on the Mass readings of the day.

As we put today’s first reading and gospel together, we realize that the climactic moments of Jesus’ ministry where he heals great numbers of the sick, disabled, and possessed only make sense in the shadow of the Cross. And, the Cross only makes sense in light of His role as the great, eternal High Priest.

In the gospel we see Jesus pressed from every side as the afflicted clamor to get close to Him for healing. It is a very vivid, earthy picture, where we even see Him order up a boat in case he needs a little physical distance.

Yet this very earthy seen is part of a glorious plan that, per the first reading, ultimately plays out for eternity in Heaven, where the great High priest has entered once and for all, offering Himself as the definitive sacrifice.

One can say that, as omnipotent as God is, and by inclusion of course therefore Jesus Christ Himself is likewise, He set up such an inviolable and permanent respect for man’s freedom, that to release us from the consequences of that freedom, He felt the need to offer Himself up in atonement.

It is this act of atonement, Jesus’ death on the Cross, that reaches back and overshadows with its power the incredibly potent scene in today’s gospel, of the transmission of saving healing. The power to save man from the consequences of his sin comes from the Cross.

And it is that same act of atonement, the one we see by its effect present in today’s earthy scene, that is offered eternally by the great High Priest, Jesus Christ, to His Father for us all.

Not only the gospel, but all of salvation history, from the moment Adam sinned to the end of time–indeed, all of history–revolves around the saving act of Jesus’ death and Resurrection. And, with the great High Priest offering that sacrifice for eternity in heaven, eternity itself revolves around the very same axis.

Ideas for conversation with the Lord: One can never meditate too much on the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. But today, perhaps meditate on these mysteries in in a new light: The light of how they stand center stage in both time and in eternity as the apex moment of the grand plan that God designed for man at the beginning. Then, chat with Jesus, great High Priest and yet your intimate friend, and ask Him to help your life to fit into that plan in just the manner that He wishes.

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