Healing

Christmastide after Epiphany (Friday, 11 January 2019)

1 John 5:5-13. Psalm 147:12-15, 19-20. Luke 5:12-16. (Please click the following link for the above readings http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/011119.cfm.)

“If you want to, you can cure me.”

As we see in today's gospel reading, the only condition for healing is our willingness and openness to be healed. But no healing is automatic or magical. Healing takes time as nature itself would testify. And it is a process, even a painful process.

“Is healing without pain, knowledge without study, and love without sacrifice possible?” asks Fulton Sheen. Very often we want healing without pain. We want an automatic or magical result. We want to take the short-cuts, we are impatient and want only the end result. We want to avoid the painful process of arriving at the healing as much as possible.

Or worse still, we want miracles and magical cures more than healing. Most often, we want to meet Jesus the miracle worker rather than Jesus the healer. We want God to give answers and solutions instantly. We prefer God the magician to the One who is involved silently in our pains and struggles.

Our pain, deep as it is, is connected with specific circumstances. We do not suffer in the abstract. We suffer because someone hurts us at a specific time and in a specific place. Our feelings of rejection, abandonment, and uselessness are rooted in the most concrete events.

Still, as long as we keep pointing to the specifics, we will miss the full meaning of our pain. We will deceive ourselves into believing that if the people, circumstances, and events had been different, our pain would not exist. “My suffering would have been less, if there were a different husband, a different superior, a different neighbour, a different partner, and so on.” This might be partly true, but the deeper truth is that the situation which brought about our pain was simply the form in which we came in touch with the human condition of suffering. Our pain is the concrete way in which we participate in the pain of humanity. 

Paradoxically, therefore, healing means moving from our pain to embracing a larger pain. When we keep focusing on the specific circumstances of our pain, we easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive – even seek revenge. We can learn from Mary, our Mother: healing means moving from our pain to the pain. She stands at the foot of the cross, she stands in communion with Jesus’ suffering. But she is not alone, she stands along with Mary Magdalene, other women, also the beloved disciple of Jesus. She stands in communion with other humans too. She takes her suffering out of isolation, and places it in the context of the cross, Jesus’ cross. She takes her pain out of isolation, and shares it with her fellow-sufferers, fellow-believers.

The pains and demands attached to our day to day living can only be dealt with by taking them out of their isolation, and place it in the larger context of love, healing, growth and maturity. Everything has it place, including pain.

As we read in the gospels, any of Jesus' miracle is not about the medical cure, but about healing, about wholeness. Today do we truly desire wholeness? Are we willing to embrace pain in this process of arriving at healing and wholeness?