Healing

Grace for the Week…

To feel a profound, personal sorrow for my infidelity in responding to God’s steadfast and merciful love—and a deep experience of reconciliation with him.

Healing

We turn to God for the healing of our sin and sinfulness, a grace which God offers us and of which he assures us.  But what does it mean to be healed?  It is not to stop sinning.  None of us will achieve that in this lifetime.  Rather, to be healed is to be able to truly accept forgiveness—for your own sins and for those committed against you.

Forgiveness is not just about resolving specific infractions.  More fundamentally it calls us to an ongoing conversion of heart that changes our very response to sin from one of shame, anger, or despair to one of sorrow for the sin committed and love for the sinner who has given in to it.  In the Mosaic Law, justice and mercy are commonly paired.  Jesus goes further and tells us that as his followers mercy should actually be our response to injustice.  This does not mean we are to ignore injustice; rather, it calls us to resist the impulse to react to it with the same lack of compassion that characterized the original sin.  Turning the other cheek is an intentional act that stays our hand from striking back and thus functions as a challenge to the cycle of violence that disrupts the harmony of God’s creation.  With time, perseverance, and faith, responding to violence with the impulse of peace will start to become more natural.

Justice without mercy perpetuates the divisions in the Body of Christ that sin creates.  It leads us to objectify those who sin against us, categorizing them as less-deserving people than ourselves.  Paradoxically, however, we objectify ourselves in this process as well.  We may start to judge ourselves harshly and come to feel an unworthiness that we make up for by doubling down on judging others.  Perhaps most damaging is that we may become unable to forgive ourselves, and that draws us away from God and from an honest yet humble respect for ourselves as beloved, gifted children of God.  This is why God calls us to look at sin for what it is—the diminishment of the people God created us to be and the squandering of the gifts we have received from him and others.  As one theologian has put it, “We are punished by our sins, not by God for our sins.”

Original sin reversed the loving, forward flow of our gifts, turning them back destructively on themselves.  What was given as compassion for others is reversed into preoccupation with self.  What was given as an invitation to imaginative co-creation with God is reversed into a greedy ambition for self-promotion.  What was given as a community-building forgiveness is reversed into a rationalizing self-justification.  When we “taste,” feel, and appropriate interiorly the destructive reversal that sin is, especially in our own lives, we come to understand and to experience the healing reversal Christ brings.

What God gives us in Christ is not simply a “re-reversal” but a thoroughgoing transformation, a revolutionary renewal that “makes all things new.”  We stand firmly on that far shore of radical renewal in Christ, and that enables us to recognize sin at work in us and in our world and to have the inner grace and fortitude to confront it, knowing that God’s love and wisdom will sustain and guide us every step of the way.  Our healing thus empowers us to co-labor with God in the building up of his Kingdom.

—Reflection adapted by Christine Szczepanowski from A Year of Prayer Guide Book produced by the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus (2005)

A Prayer for the Week

When night comes
and you look back over the day
and see how fragmentary
everything has been,
and how much you planned
that has gone undone,
and all the reasons you have to be
embarrassed and ashamed:
just take everything
exactly as it is,
put it in God’s hands
and leave it with Him.
Then you will be able to rest in Him
–really rest—
and start the next day
as a new life.

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD (Edith Stein)