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Tuesday, Fourth Week of Lent B (March 16, 2021)
Your Daily Blessing: May the Lord turn your pains and sufferings into happiness and joy. Amen.
Read Isaiah 65:17-21; John 4:43-54; pray Psalm 30[29].
Before contracting cancer, she was a beautiful, young, and vibrant, and very pious and unassuming lady, enjoying her job as a pharmacist.
When I saw her in hospital, I was embarrassed for her sake! All that physical beauty was gone: shaven head, sunken eyes, frail and skeletal body.
She lay helpless, almost lifeless, humiliated. Yet, there was something in her that amazed me, she was resigned to God’s will and filled with deep peace.
In that condition, she radiated love, and revealing God in a way only the eyes of faith could see. I left her presence feeling like it was God’s presence, even as I shed tears she was dying. Her death was an epiphany for me.
I could not agree more with Ronald Rolheiser, a Canadian spiritual writer that I admire, when he writes: “Whenever we see someone who is unable to protect herself or himself against pain, especially the type of pain that humbles and humiliates, we are witnessing the humiliation of God in the world. And if we have the eyes of faith, we will know that we stand at that place where the deeper secrets of heaven are revealed. We see it in an adult body ravaged by age, handicap, or terminal disease.
I could not agree more with Ronald Rolheiser, a Canadian spiritual writer that I admire, when he writes: “Whenever we see someone who is unable to protect herself or himself against pain, especially the type of pain that humbles and humiliates, we are witnessing the humiliation of God in the world. And if we have the eyes of faith, we will know that we stand at that place where the deeper secrets of heaven are revealed. We see it in an adult body ravaged by age, handicap, or terminal disease.
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"We see this too whenever we see anyone who, for whatever reason, is perceived by others as naïve, unattractive, stupid, or somehow an embarrassment to himself or herself.”
Our role in such instances should be ‘reverent silence’ for we are in the presence of deep mystery. Wherever God is humbled, or humiliated, a deep secret is communicated.
And as “deep calls unto deep,” we can also bring the person the “waters of life” (See Ezekiel 47:1-12) which is what Jesus communicated to the paralytic in the Gospel today (John 5:1-16).
We carry within us “living waters” especially when we receive the eucharist, we go out to give life to whosoever we meet that day.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, you are the living water that gives life everywhere you go. Help me radiate you by bringing life (kindness, love, mercy) to whomsoever I meet today. Amen
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, you are the living water that gives life everywhere you go. Help me radiate you by bringing life (kindness, love, mercy) to whomsoever I meet today. Amen
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