Healing

God cannot approach us how we expect Him to. He must go around our expectations. He must disorient us...in our disorientation we are made open.

That thought is from Fr. Faulkner, a priest with the Catholic students at UNL. A carload of us journeyed to UNL yesterday (there and back in 11 hours...but that's a story in itself) for a healing Mass. His homily focused on his experience in going to Lourdes.  He said that most people go for a specific intention in mind, but as you wait for hours in line to enter the waters, that waiting and that time to think and ponder changes you and by the time you reach the waters, your thoughts and intentions are often completely different.  The experience of going through the process to get to the water itself sounds like an experience and the process, he said, is completely disorienting.  But in that disorientation is where Christ breaks through.  If He came to us and healed us exactly how we wanted, that would allow for us to be prideful and even demanding of Him.  Instead, Christ finds His way around our expectations. Rarely do I ever find my prayers are answered in the way I want...He either waits for a different time to answer the prayer, or answers the prayer differently altogether.  Really, when I have expectations for Him, I in a way hold Him at bay until He do things my own way. But what if I let my guard down and let Him have His way??

When I was on my way with the others to the Mass, I started realizing as we were nearing the university that I had NO idea what I wanted prayers for.  I assumed that we were supposed to have something in mind, and I had nothing.  Not that there aren't situations that I could have prayed for, there certainly are...but in that moment, I blanked.  Maybe that's exactly where God wanted me in my life...a blank slate for Him to write on.  Or rather, just to be unaware of myself for a while and more aware of Him.  As Mass went on though, and I began to figure out in my mind what I wanted to ask the prayer team to pray about for healing in my life, I started to have second thoughts about going up for healing after Mass.  It came out like this as I wrote after Mass:

"I'm so scared to go for healing. Scared of Your gaze, of admitting my fault, of seeing me the way You might see me. Do I have to open up those wounds I have again? Yet your wounds were reopened when You were stripped of Your outer garments...and the slave is not greater than the master."

Father said in his homily that when Jesus was resurrected, His wounds were not taken away, but He used them to heal others. Those who had wounded Him were wounded themselves, and now He could heal them.  It was definitely good to keep that in mind, preparing for going up for prayers of healing...knowing that God might not take those negative aspects out of my life, but also having the knowledge that He might ask me to use those wounds to reach out to others and heal. I have no idea how my spiritual, emotional, even physical wounds might heal others, but I guess that's a life-learning experience.  If Jesus used His wounds to heal the world, and I am meant to imitate Him, then I must learn how my hurts, failings, etc., might be used to heal others.  Maybe it's in learning to heal others that we experience our own healing...

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!