I have seen it happen with my own eyes, this healing in the name of Jesus. While in Detroit at the Saint Paul Evangelization Institute conference last year, a priest who is involved in healing ministry said to the crowd, "I am getting a word...does anyone have a hand with pain?" Sounds very Pentecostal, doesn't it? I probably wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see it: a man approached him later, and I caught the healing out of the corner of my eye. I saw his hand shaking, and he was healed. Steve, a layman who had been trained in healing by this particular priest, also received a word that there was someone in the crowd with pain in the foot, and hand. A woman with a cyst in her left hand came forward, and was healed--it simply disappeared. The woman with the pain in her left foot was also healed. Nothing is impossible with God.
And yet in the spiritual life it is easy to assume things, assigning our minds to the mind of God, forgetting the word of the Lord who proclaims, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). God does not think as we think. He sees everything in its context, in scale, and in its rightful time and place in the divine economy.
The early disciples must have felt that the death of Jesus on the cross was an abject failure, a waste of a holy man and prophet who taught good things and healed many, a lost opportunity to restore Israel and overthrow the Romans once and for all. Through natural eyes, all this is true. And yet it was not the whole story. The suffering of Christ on the cross was necessary for our salvation. There was no workaround, and even if there was, to avoid his fate was in fact a temptation for Jesus in his agony. His prayer is a spirituality unto itself: "Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done." (Lk 22:42).
When it comes to suffering, we as Catholic Christians have a deep theology. Suffering is not an empty currency, and yet no one can escape it. Those who try to insulate themselves from it typically bring more misery upon themselves in the long run. We are all destined for the grave. We think to ourselves, “Because I don’t want to suffer, God must not want me to suffer as well.” It means, in our minds, that something is wrong. And so we avoid suffering and tend towards things that please our senses. This is completely natural. But it may not be the will of God.
When our Lord was explaining to the disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer at the hands of the chief priests and elders, and that he must be killed, his closest confident, Peter, rebuked him, crying “God forbid it, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” It was a natural and human response. And yet Jesus turns to Peter and rebukes him strongly, saying "Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's" (Mt 16:21-23).
At the Transfiguration, when Jesus appears conversing with Moses and Elijah, Peter (again) seems to miss the bigger picture. He confidently states that it is good for them to be there, and that he will erect three tabernacles: one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. But a cloud covered them and a voice booms, "This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!" He and the disciples fall flat, terrified and humbled (Mt 17:1-5).
Our sole goal in life should be to do God’s holy will--in sickness or health, in riches or poverty, in good times and bad. St. Alphonsus de Liguori, in his thin treatise “Uniformity With God’s Will,” recounts two stories of miraculous healings, but with a twist.
In the first, a client of St. Thomas Becket went to the saint’s tomb to pray for a cure for his sickness, and he was indeed cured. But upon returning home he thought to himself, "Suppose it would be better for my soul's salvation if I remained sick, what point then is there in being well?" So he returned to the saint’s tomb and asked for St. Thomas’ intercession again but with a different request: that God would grant him what would be best for his eternal salvation. His illness returned, and it was reported that the client was perfectly content, convinced that God had disposed of him for his own good.
The second story is similar. A blind man prayed to St. Bedasto, bishop, to be cured of his blindness, and he regained his sight. But he too thought the matter over and reconsidered his prayer. This time, he prayed that if the possession of his sight were not expedient for his soul, that his blindness should return. And that is what happened--his blindness returned.
St. Alphonsus states, “Therefore, in sickness it is better that we seek neither sickness nor health, but that we abandon ourselves to the will of God so that he may dispose of us as he wishes. However, if we decide to ask for health, let us do so at least always resigned and with the provision that our bodily health may be conducive to the health of our soul. Otherwise our prayer will be defective and will remain unheard because our Lord does not answer prayers made without resignation to his holy will.”
We don’t need to go looking for suffering, because as long as we live, suffering will eventually find us. But how we respond to it is the make-or-break, what determines our fate. To transcend and be transformed by whatever it is that God sends our way has the potential to give us a deep and abiding peace. When we have mastered being resigned to the Divine will in all circumstances, we can say with St. Paul, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” (Philippians 4:12)
Nothing is greater than to do the will of God, to be obedient to His will. He can use everything, and nothing is wasted in the Divine economy, when we dispose ourselves to His will. We pray for healing in our sickness and sufferings and trust with everything we have that God can do it. And yet how much more perfect our prayer when it is qualified by that trusting anguish of Jesus in Gethsemane, when we unite our will with his and lift up our suffering as an oblation--”yet not be will, but Yours be done.”
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