The importance of a touch

Here's my homily from this past weekend. Obviously, St. Terese has been working on my heart this week. There's a lot more that could be said about this, but I'll let the Holy Spirit fill all of that in for you.

By the way, I love it when you comment. Any feedback is always appreciated. May your week be blessed!

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~ Given at Sacred Heart and Saint Augustine Parishes, Jeffersonville, IN: February 11-12, 2012

One of the most indispensible parts, it seems, of any intimate relationship is touch. Parents touch their children regularly in order to show them their care and affection. A husband and wife will hug and kiss each other when they are coming and going or when they get up in the morning or go to bed at night, and various other times in between. Children who are best friends will walk side by side each with an arm around the other’s shoulder (“they’re ‘joined at the hip’” is the common expression). Grown men, sometimes less comfortable with more sensitive expressions of intimacy, will often slap their friends on the shoulder as a sign of camaraderie. And for young couples, holding hands is often the first expression of a growing affection. From the opposite standpoint, turning away from touch is often an indicator that intimacy has been broken or damaged, such as when a husband or a wife gives their spouse the “cold shoulder.”

As a matter of fact, in the Catholic Church we know this very well. We ritualize the intimacy of human touch in the sacraments, most poignantly in the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. February 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, is designated in the Church as the “World Day for the Sick,” in which we remind ourselves of the special place that care for the sick and dying holds in the life of the Church. And in the Church’s sacrament for the sick, which is meant to be a spiritual strengthening for “one who has begun to be in danger due to sickness or old age,” human touch plays a prominent role, in the laying on of hands and the anointing with oil. And so again we see that, for humans, touch is important.

In the first reading today, we heard the instructions given to Moses and Aaron regarding how to handle a person afflicted with leprosy inside of the community. The ancient Hebrews were deeply concerned with maintaining a status of “ritual purity” before God because they believed that to present an offering to God when one was “impure” would taint also one’s offering and thus render it displeasing to God. Thus, the segregation of lepers (who were considered to have been afflicted because of some impurity) was intended to ensure that the rest of the community was kept safe from defilement through contact with them. As a result, the physical suffering of the leprous person was compounded by an emotional suffering as he or she was literally cut off from all human touch, and, thus, intimacy, for fear of making others unclean.

In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, we find a leper who was so moved by faith in Christ’s power to heal him that he completely disregarded the rules regarding the segregation of lepers and approached Jesus in order to beg him for healing. Jesus knew well the purity laws and what he would have to go through if he touched this man. He also knew that he would not have to touch this man in order to heal him of his leprosy. He knew that a simple word would effect the cure. Yet, he saw more than a physical ailment in this man. He saw the emotional suffering of shame and humiliation that comes from being cut off from one’s community and knew that more than just a word was needed to make him whole again. Thus, the Gospel tells us that Jesus was“moved with pity” and that he first touched the man before he pronounced his words of healing. No, it wasn’t the touch that healed the man of his leprosy, Christ’s word alone was sufficient. It was the touch, however, that made him feel human, connected again with the community that was his life.

Of course it’s easy to see modern day examples of leprosy in our own society. We simply need to look at those who have been marginalized and pushed“outside the camp” of our daily living so as not to defile our efforts to live a pure life. It would also be easy to remind ourselves of our duty to respond to these individuals as Jesus did by reaching out to them, touching them, helping them to find healing and inviting them to join the community once again. What is not so easy for us is to look inwardly, at ourselves, in order to discover the spiritual leprosy of sin that afflicts each of us.

St. Bede, in commenting on this passage, has said: “This man prostrated himself on the ground, as a sign of humility and shame, to teach each of us to be ashamed of the stains of his [or her own] life. But shame should not prevent us from confessing: the leper showed his wound and begged for healing.” St. Terese of Liseux has said that shame for our sins should never prevent us from reaching out to Jesus. In fact, she has said, our increasing awareness of and shame for our sins should make us reach out all the more desperately to him, because the more we acknowledge our sinfulness, the more we openly show our wounds to Jesus, the more, in a sense, attractive we are to him, to his mercy, and thus he is more moved to touch us and to heal us.

My brothers and sisters, the trick to living the Christian life is not just in reaching out to the marginalized in our society, the modern-day lepers with “outward” afflictions. Rather, the trick is being able to first recognize our own afflictions, our own leprosy, and having the courage—or rather the faith—to throw ourselves down before God, before Jesus, and beg for his mercy.

As his Body, the Church, Jesus wants us to be his hands in this world, bringing his healing touch to those who need it. He wants his hands to be pure, however. And so, as we seek to extend Christ’s ministry of mercy to those around us, let us acknowledge also our need for healing, let us seek out the sacrament of reconciliation and open ourselves to each other so that we may share each other’s burdens. And let us give thanks, as we do here today, for Christ’s saving mercy, so that we may go forth from this place making known the good things he has done for us.

+Pax+

The difference a year makes...

A friend of mine who is approaching her first wedding anniversary wrote that in an e-mail to me the other day and I realized that today, October 30th, is the one-year anniversary of my first chemotherapy treatment. At the time, I had no idea how it was going to turn out. And now, only one year later, I know how it turned out. I took the treatments well, I completed them without a hitch, and I achieved remission (...all through God's grace, of course!). One year ago today, I was wondering when or if I would get really sick, and when I'd lose my hair. Today, I ran a 5K and have a full head of hair (and then some!). What a difference a year makes, indeed.

So, am I better for it? Unqualifiably, yes. Would I have ever asked to do it that way? Heck no! But that's the best part. Something I would have never chosen or planned for helped me to grow in ways I couldn't have imagined when it all began. Some of the happiest people I know learned this secret a long time ago, but I share it with you here and will leave you with a challenge: Instead of trying to force everything to be the way you plan it to be, how about letting go and seeing where those challenges to your plans lead you? Try it for a year. You never know what a difference a year can make.

Church and Forrest Gump

By God's grace, I've had the last few weeks without parish or seminary responsibilities to reflect on my experience in Guatemala and I've finally hit on a way to describe it that sums up how it has affected me. I hope that it transmits well what I perceive as my experience to you as you read it.

One of the most significant things that I think I've experienced has simply been a greater appreciation of what it means to be Church. The Church is not a place, not a building of stone and steel and wood, but it is a body, that is, Christ's body, which is a union of persons, the faithful who have been sacramentally initiated into it, and so it seems to me that whenever we experience another person, that is, whenever we consciously recognize the personhood of someone whom we've met, what we really experience, in part, is a new dimension of the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ here on earth. These dimensions often times are almost unnoticeable if we aren't paying attention. Sometimes, however, they expand our vision beyond what we thought we were looking for.

With this in mind as I reflect back on my experience in Guatemala, I am struck by how my life has become intertwined with people whom I have no logical reason to have ever met. When describing my experience over the past few weeks, I've recognized how much I sometimes must seem a little like Forrest Gump. For those of you who may not be familiar with the movie, it is the story of a man whom most wouldn't give much credit to. He is unassuming in appearance and mentally slow. The story unfolds as Forrest shares his life experiences with various people one day while waiting for a bus. Each person is amazed as this unassuming man reveals his amazing life experiences and how they have intertwined his life with some of the most famous people and important events of his time. Yet, he doesn't see it as anything outside of the ordinary. He just sees it as his life, as if it was normal to receive the medal of honor and to have meet president Kennedy as well as to have "fallen into" a wildly successful shrimping business and gotten in on the ground floor of the Apple corporation. I suspect most of you have seen this movie and so this description, hopefully, is sufficient to bring it forward in your consciousnesses. (If not check out the Wikipedia article on it.)

And so, in my reflections and in sharing my experiences, this is something of what it feels like. As I describe my experiences, I often times don't see anything out of the ordinary about them. I just look at them as experiences that anyone might have that, if given the opportunity to have them, would have. Yet I see in the faces of others this sense of amazement that causes me to reflect back and to see just how incredible some of these experiences really are. I also see, however, that these are not experiences that are far from us, because in the end these are all part of the experience of being human, that is, the human experience. By sharing with each other our experiences of other people, the relationships and the intertwining of our lives, we share more and more of what it really means to be human. When we come to experience this more and more we become more authentically human. Authentic humanity, then, is the shared experience, that is, the experience of community, which, in part, is what it means to be Church.

And so it is with joy that I share these experiences with you and I am humbled by the blessings through which I have been given the opportunity to have them. I thank you all for continuing to share my journey with me and I look forward, with hope, to the continued journey. As always, thank you for your prayers!