The mystery of our disabilities

In tomorrow's Gospel reading Jesus heals a leper. John Kavanaugh, S.J. of St. Louis University writes of this passage,

We may even someday wish to present ourselves to God as spotless milk bottles, clean, whole, pasteurized, and uncontaminated: a sad delusion. For not only is the aspiration impossible; the whole point of Christ's redemptive life is missed.

The gospel invites us to enter the mystery of our own disabilities, hidden or otherwise. We need not fear those moments of being secret "lepers" ourselves, those parts of our being we hide away and lock up: our failures and sins, our vanities and deceptions, our jealousies and fakery. He will reach out to touch us there. It is only our denial that prevents the cure.

The gospel is also an invitation for us to enter into the being of Christ himself. If he is indeed our way, our truth, our life, then we make his person our own. We too can heal. We need not fear the visibly wounded who only remind us of our human frailty. The excluded and marginal, the ostracized and hidden, await our own touch. The very old or very ill need not threaten us if we allow them to name the truth of our shared inability to stand invulnerable before the world.

All of us are old. And all of us are frail. All of us, indeed, are handicapped. It's just that some of us can pretend better than others.