Lent Week 1: Friday | Matthew 9 (9-17)
Blessings, Duffy.
I pray that your Lenten journey is generating rich insights. Yesterday afternoon I received a call from the doctor's office and learned that a growth I had removed from my nose last week tested positive for cancer. It's the basal cell kind of cancer, which is supposedly the most common and least dangerous, but the biopsy results were still enough of a jolt to awaken the "sleeping Jesus" in the storm-tossed boat that we discussed in our reading yesterday morning. I can feel in my bones that whatever happens in the weeks ahead, I am in the calm, capable, and loving hands of the Master Physician.
"Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing." James 1:2-4 (NLT)
It would be wrong for me to say that I am feeling perfect and complete, needing nothing, but I am definitely farther along on the path of spiritual maturity than I was four years ago. My inner Jesus is awake and in control, not my frightened inner disciple. Last night as I did my Ignatian Examen, I actually experienced an unexpected moment of deep gratitude, peace and joy. I am convinced it was an embrace from Jesus. Now that more time has passed, my anxious human disciple's mind has had a chance to do some catastrophizing, but the Divine Physician is unperturbed within.
Both of the Gospel readings today - Matthew 9 in our study with N.T. Wright and John 5:1-15 in the 1962 Roman Missal - emphasize the role of Jesus as a miraculous healer. Let's take a deep dive with Gemini into the two basic ways that Christians can understand these healings.
Here is a list of ten questions I recently asked Gemini. The results are quite impressive. If any of these questions pique your interest, click on the link to see what Gemini had to say. But please don't feel obligated to read them all. The first three questions and also the fifth are perhaps the most relevant for today's Gospel selections.
1. How do progressive Christians and conservative Christians agree and how do they differ in their interpretation of the miraculous healings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels?
2. How do progressive and conservative Christians agree and differ in their approach to the appropriateness of prayer for physical healing?
3. How do these two groups explain the apparent absence of supernatural physical healings and exorcisms by Christian leaders today?
4. Do observant Jews and Muslims tend to fall into the same two groups (progressive and conservative) as Christians when it comes to the nature and efficacy of prayer for physical healing?
5. How do conservative and progressive Christians approach the paradoxical phenomenon that many people - and their caregivers - seem to grow closer to Jesus through illness, to the point that a physical illness, while never desirable, can become a kind of hidden spiritual gift and healing for the souls involved?
6. Let's start to conclude this session by exploring how practicing the Ignatian Examen twice a day can build up the spiritual "muscle" of gratitude to protect against spiritual burnout and feeling abandoned by God during illness. Or is this a youthful idealization of the benefits of Ignatian spirituality - do senior Ignatian practitioners go through burnout and feelings of abandonment by God, too?
7. Do senior Buddhist practitioners experience spiritual burnout and crises of faith, too - is this a reality of illness and aging that is shared and faced in common by human experts in all religious traditions?
8. What kind of support systems work best to help senior religious practitioners finish strong in their mortal weakness?
9. Is there a type or specialty of spiritual direction that helps senior religious practitioners?
10. Do experts learn how to provide spiritual direction across the life course, or do they tend to specialize in direction for a particular age range?
Alright, Duffy, that's it for today's deep dive. Breathing in, God is with us. Breathing out, joyful gratitude. Thank you so much for your spiritual companionship!
In grace and peace.
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