Every Wednesday evening at our 5:05pm Mass, a small group of people comes to our small chapel to pray for recovery and healing from addictions. Fewer than a dozen gather quietly through the steel chapel doors to open their lives to one another. People assemble from all walks of life - office workers, our volunteers and people just entering a recovery program down the street.
I listen with my soul to these people in recovery. People struggling through the maze of alcohol addiction slowly speak aloud their confusion. Others speak openly about how they were abused emotionally as children and the chilling effects from the past that linger as they age. Some sit silently, listening to others and praying. No matter what is said or not said, I stand in our urban chapel with people’s life issues caught in my heart and voice as I pray to God for healing.
We celebrate the Eucharist with special simplicity and intention. After the Gospel proclamation, I offer brief words of how the Gospel penetrates our selfishness or how Jesus is offering us a healing touch. I offer questions for people to ponder or to verbally respond to with the story of their lives. I am always amazed at people’s honesty and the risk they take in our dimly lit chapel to expose their past to Christ’s light.
Every week this celebration of Eucharist feeds me with a bounty of honesty and compassion. I see for myself how the snares of our addictions are only untangled in the presence of Christ Jesus. This encounter takes radical honesty and raw faith. Face to face encounters with Christ in this public setting show me that the Gospels are still telling tales of healing, faith and change.
The Gospels for the Twenty-Third to the Thirtieth Sundays in Ordinary Time especially reveal to us all a personal contact with Christ’s healing touch. People bring a deaf man to Jesus and they beg him to lay his hand on him. The deaf man approaches Jesus with an obvious need. He exposes his vulnerability before others and to Jesus. Even though Jesus takes him apart from the crowd, people have already acknowledged his deafness. Jesus uses fingers, spit and touch to open his human ears and restore his speech.
I also realize every day working among the poor that I have enough money and education to hide many aspects of myself, to hold the pieces together. I can deny my deafness to others’ stories, my blindness to people’s requests and even my own selfish concerns. My role in ministry enables me to hide from the demons I know so well. So as I celebrate the Wednesday evening Mass, I am reminded that only Christ can reach us behind our masks of pain, our nervous control, and our abilities to hurt other people.
Jesus asks us a question face to face, “Who do you say that I am?” I see the courage of people who need a new freedom of heart answering this question every day of their lives. They do so because addictions attack even the root of faith. Fear can keep us all separated from admitting our need or even naming the person of Jesus. We can lose our lives in this heart-wrenching fear or we can decide to take up our cross and believe suffering will lead us out of darkness.
Many people argue with Jesus about their recovery. They bargain with God to hold on to fear. Jesus gives us all a model of the child, who comes openly, freely, willingly to the feet of Christ. Addictions cause us all to feel we are last, but we become first in knowing God’s love and mercy even well beyond our childhood.
Jesus reminds us that if we can even give someone a drink of water we will step out of our own selfish ways. We then admit that our bargaining, our callousness, our self-sufficiency are the crosses we carry all the way to the Kingdom. We carry these negative issues as millstones around our necks, as reminders that only God can heal or cut away our harmful behaviors.
Jesus also tells us that our inheritance is more than reciting commandments or words memorized from our youth. Christ shows us that we will inherit the mercy of God when we finally give up our control of everything and truly give ourselves over to those who most need us. Addictions break their bonds on our souls when we are serious about letting go of all the internal possessions of fear, regret and anger. Then we will know the freedom to serve the poor, listen to the lonely and accept people who threaten our place in life.
Every Wednesday at the evening Eucharist I pray for the courage of Bartimaeus. I hear all of us crying our eyes out for the miracle of Christ to heal every aspect of sin, division, heartache and isolation. I ponder how Bartimaeus’ blindness helps us all see Christ and hear his haunting question, “What do you want me to do for you?” I ache to speak out on everyone’s behalf that we all want to see!
On Wednesday evenings I am in direct contact with God. Exposure to the bitterness of drug addiction and even the entangling web of food addiction changes my belief in God and turns my heart toward compassion. These Gospels also teach me that direct contact with Jesus still opens our ears, still releases tongues and still casts millstones into the sea. Contact with people’s honest suffering, mingling with my own fear and insecurity, shows me the healing hand of Christ Jesus.
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