Daily Reflection Memorial of Saint Agatha, Virgin and Martyr

Today’s reading from Mark ends the sixth chapter of the gospel. It was preceded by two major events, the feeding of the five thousand (the multiplication of the loaves and fish as it is also known) and Jesus walking on water past his disciples as they struggled with the boat in a hard wind. The brief passage today talks about healings in the area of Gennesaret, however, it was quite probably the same everywhere Jesus went. The picture the passage seems to paint is both the sense of so many in need and the abundance of the healing that occurred (“And all who touched it [the hem of Jesus’ garment] were healed). Acts 5:15-16 echoes this image when it describes the Apostle Peter’s mere shadow falling on people that brought healing. That passage too says that all were healed.

However, lurking below this image there is another understanding of God’s power to heal that is both very freely available and very efficacious, even now far outside the Apostolic age of the early Church when so many miracles of bodily healing were recorded. Bodily healing, of course, still occurs today, but it must be admitted that it very much seems a rarity. But there are other types of healing that God can readily supply that we must understand as spiritual healings. I very much believe that these spiritual healings are available to all of us if we but have faith in God’s power and seek it through a spirit of repentance and turning fully to God through daily prayer, turning from sinful ways and abandoning our will for the will of God. 

Bodily or physical healing, of course, has always something of the miraculous about it. It can also be a temptation to think of it as something that we can only describe as magical. And it is physical healing that most people pray for, often leading to disappointment and doubt in or bitterness toward God or even complete loss of faith when that healing does not happen. But the spiritual healing that would lead to total acceptance of our maladies, finding peace and joy even in suffering, is actually God’s gift to us all if we would only believe it. To see someone free of fear and despair over illness, full of serenity and great trust in God despite it, is perhaps an even greater sign of God’s love than actual physical healing would be. The great difference between physical verses spiritual healing is that one heals only the body while the other heals the heart, the memory and the entire understanding of the whole person. It changes our entire spiritual selves, not just our bodies.

The desire for physical healing can also lead to thinking that we must somehow convince God to give it to us, that we must somehow try to change God’s mind. It can lead to a sense of desperation or even despair. It can also lead to an attitude that all we have to do is keep asking but with ever greater desperation, whereas the spiritual healing that is ours asks us to change our attitude and behavior to one of great trust in God and seeking to do only God’s will. In short, it asks us to change and begin to seek God humbly and spiritually in great willingness to surrender our hearts to the Lord.

God will always give us this spiritual healing if we seek it in great faith and trust in God, no matter what happens. It will be poured out on us fulfilling what the Gospel today and Acts told us, “And all were healed.” But we must do something. We cannot simply sit there waiting for God to instantly transform us which dangerously flirts with magical thinking, that God is somehow there to solve all our problems and take away all our pain. “Thy will be done,” should be our continual prayer, not in the sense of some fatalistic idea that there is nothing that can be done, but that through complete acceptance, which is entirely a spiritual gift from above, we come to believe that we can find God in everything, no matter how painful or frightening it may seem. That kind of faith will take away our fear and when that happens, we find God’s love and are enabled to love others, even in our sufferings. It is utterly transformative, making us true disciples of Jesus, able to proclaim the Kingdom much more powerfully than if we were simply physically healed because our entire person has been healed not just our body. It is then we would discover that, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for you are at my side.” It is then we would discover that, “Only goodness and kindness shall follow me all the days of my life!”