This Sunday, we once again hear about Jesus curing many who were sick (Mark 1:29-39). Each and every one of us needs Jesus Christ to heal us in mind, body and soul. He is the Redeemer, the Only Savior of the world. Jean Vanier, a Catholic theologian and philosopher and founder of L’Arche (The Ark, please visit the website: jean-vanier.org/en), an international network of communities that serve the developmentally disabled, gets the last word:
“Being reborn in Jesus is not rapid for many of us. It is a quiet, gentle growth, like the growth of the child in the womb of his mother and like his gradual growth in knowledge, affection, physical strength, and understanding after birth. The healing power of the Holy Spirit is a quiet, gentle power. He makes die in us all the fears, the desire to possess or to destroy, the hurts and the frustrations, all the power which wants to dominate. There is a growth in the power of listening, the power of compassion, of patience, of learning to wait for the hour of God. We learn to surrender to the power of the Spirit, the power of God, to stop agitating, to let God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit take over our lives, to abandon ourselves to the Supreme Healer.”
“Jesus manifests Himself as He walks through Judea, when He comes to give sight to the blind, to enable the lame man to walk, and the deaf to hear. All these are essentially symbols of something much deeper. He opens the eyes of the heart, so that we begin to see reality as it is, so that we see our wounded brothers and sisters, see their anguish. He opens our ears, for just as we see but are blind to reality, so we hear but do not listen. There is a fundamental healing that must take place before we really can listen to the music of reality, before we can listen to people without fear, before we can listen to the Holy Spirit (and when we listen to the Spirit, we’re listening to the Father and the Son, in the mystery of the Holy Trinity).”
“Jesus the Healer comes when we are conscious that we need a healer; when we become conscious of our own egoism, all the anarchy of desire, all the fears, all the cowardice and weakness, all the need for human security that incites us to possess. It is only when we become conscious of our weakness and our fears that we can begin to grow in union with the Holy Spirit.”
With prayers and peace in Christ,
Fr. William
Saint Clement Parish 