MASS FOR HEALING and FOR THE SICK
Carmarthen
Thu 08 Oct 09 @ 1900

The Queen and Prince Philip visit a home for the deaf.  …
“Chin up, ole girl.  You’re looking like a wet lettuce.”
Deaf people burst out laughing. Lip-read Duke’s words.

For us tonight, this is a place of pilgrimage. For tonight, it is associated in a special way with those who are sick or disabled, or anyone who stands in need of healing.  These are the VIPs among us. But who has the greater disability?

1. the one we look at and shy away from?
2. or are we ourselves the ones with the disability because of our feelings of awkwardness or embarrassment?

Everyone comes to realise they have a disability of some sort, something that needs healing. After a service like this, everyone returns home, not necessarily cured, but healed in some way. That is the miracle that goes on quietly within us.

In the Gospel it says:
To have seen me is to have seen the Father. Not a glorified Jesus, but a suffering one. To have seen the Lord on the cross, broken, abandoned, almost totally disabled, and reduced to nothing, is to have seen the Father, and also to experience the hope of better things to come.  Surely that was Mary’s experience, as she stood at the foot of the cross.
For, like her, when we are down to nothing, God is up to something.
Like Mary, we too are called to give to others the gifts we have been given.  Life is not really our own, until we give it away, until we go out in compassion to others, until we share our life with those who are truly the poor in spirit, the downhearted, those afflicted in any way.  We have to LET GO!  LET GOD!  We have to give up our own ways, and let God in to do his work in us.  Again, that was the meaning of Mary’s FIAT: let it be done to me.

We don’t have to be handsome or pretty to do God’s work.  We don’t have to be particularly young, energetic, or active.  It’s not how we look that matters.  It’s how we feel inside. It doesn’t matter if we are sick or disabled. When we look at someone else, it doesn’t matter what the matter is.  It’s what’s inside that counts.

For, remember the prayer of the Unknown Confederate Soldier, who came to see things in a different way:
I asked for strength that I might achieve
And I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men
And I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.

The prayer ends with the following words:
Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered.
I am, among all men, most richly blessed.

+Tom M Burns – Bishop of Menevia