by Sr. Rebecca
Two of today’s scripture readings
are about new life given to two persons – one the son of the Shunammite woman,
the other a daughter of a local synagogue officer. Both died and were brought
back to life. The Gospel also recounts
the healing of a third person: the woman suffering for 12 years of hemorrhaging.
I feel drawn to center our
attention on those three living persons who manifested extraordinary love, faith,
and trust in God in the midst of these incredible afflictions: the Shunammite woman,
the bleeding woman, and the officer of the synagogue. All of them engaged
themselves in pursuing life in the midst of a crisis, of heart-breaking
losses.
Whence does this trust, this passion
for life arise in them? In all three there is great suffering. Did they succumb
to self-pity or wallow in their pain? No! Their pain generated energy. They all engaged in doing something: to
bring life into chaos!
The Shunammite woman wasted no time
to get on a donkey and take off to see the prophet Elisha. In those days, for a
woman to travel such a distance and alone was certainly dangerous. But nothing
was going to deter her. She was determined to move the prophet’s heart to come
to her home and bring her son back to life. She was not going to take no for an
answer.
We see a similar passion in the
woman who also took the risk of being crushed by the crowd following Jesus, or
by being shunned because of her condition as a woman and, to boot, a bleeding
one. she was determined to touch Jesus’ garment—her last chance to be healed.
The third, the officer of the synagogue, was taking a huge risk of being
ridiculed and demoted from his position in the synagogue by the powers that be—the
synagogue authorities—the enemies of Jesus.
All three readings deal with the gap
between suffering, death, and then new life. We hear of the gap of time between
these events. The gap was 12 years for the woman with the flow of blood. When we read or hear the stories in the
Scripture like those today, we go so quickly from the suffering and loss to the
experience of new life that we barely pause to realize what people go through
in the middle—the gap between what was, and when, after a certain length of
time, the healing or new life is experienced. Within the gap there is immense
suffering, grief, pain, even anger and bitterness of heart and mind. The past 5
months in our own lives have been filled with gaps—disturbing ones, to
say the least. We don’t need to search for them in our own lives; we all
experience them.
Gaps: in these past months and now, our lives are filled with
gaps. The daily news breaks our hearts. We see fear. We see death. We see
protests. We see anger and violence in the streets. We see prejudice and
racism. We see arrogance and self-serving privilege. We see unemployment, incredible
poverty, and economic hardship. All of these are gaps—the
open wounds of our country—and we are hemorrhaging. We are bleeding, and some cannot
breathe.
One
of the biggest gaps we face in this pandemic is uncertainty.
There
remains much uncertainty about the bigger picture, which is far from easy to
deal with. Where is the COVID-19 pandemic taking us? Will there be an effective
treatment and a vaccine? Will it be with us like the flu? How long must we
suffer social isolation—some for whom the virus might mean a death sentence?
Thoughts like these are certainly emerging one after another like a runaway
train.
Not knowing: are we not in the dark
regarding this and many other things in our lives? Uncertainty and unknowing
are basic ingredients of our human condition and are especially acute today.
This dark unknowing today, and the consequences in our daily living, affect many
people with what feels like depression. Yet, for those I hear about and with
whom I personally am in contact, it is not clinical depression but the effects
of life being turned upside down and inside out.
We are in this crisis, this chasm
of dark unknowing. But it does have a flip side, a positive value, because when
we hit rock bottom and there is nowhere to go, it invites us to trust in God. The 14th-century Sufi poet and mystic Rumi
wrote, “Return to the root of the root of yourself.” His words remind me that I
often live on the periphery or circumference of life, disconnected from the
root of my being and existence. To “return to the root of the root” of myself
ultimately means returning to God. For me, that returning necessarily involves
intentional silence and solitude.
This is a time for going inward, to
face these uncertainties, setting aside the ideas that fill our minds. We need
to be still and quiet before God. This is a time to recognize that something
greater than ourselves is at work here. It seems that it is always in the midst
of crises, of messy times, that Light pierces the hearts of people: that is,
when they face the suffering, allowing themselves to feel the passions of
anger, eros, and of deep sadness and take them to God—for example, by
meditating and praying the psalms, and not acting until a clear call is felt—along
with knowing that their own lives are at stake. It is within THIS GAP that the
energies of the passions are transformed. It happened to the prophets, to Jesus,
and to multitudes of others, right up to our present times, as in the very
recent news of the death of John Lewis.
God is everywhere present and
filling ALL things! Perhaps ending with a poem from Mary Oliver may inspire us.
Was it written, when, like so many people today, she found it hard to go into
that “gap” and pray alone?
The Summer Day
“I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” —Mary Oliver
Note: I am deeply grateful to Fr.
Michael Marsh for his own shared thoughts that have inspired me as I was
preparing this homily. He helped me find
words for some my own innermost feelings and especially to perceiving God’s
Spirit at work in me and in all of us during these most disrupting and painful
times.
