June 28, 2009: 13th Week Ordinary (B)
http://www.catholicreview.org/subpages/storyworldnew-new.aspx?action=6236
What would you do if you heard the following words from your doctor?
"Go home and prepare to die."
On May 2004, a 71-year old parishioner named Mary Ellen Heibel of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Annapolis was told that by doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. The doctors discovered cancer in her esophagus and lymph node, then later that year it spread throughout her body. She was given six months. But she was not about to quit. So she received a new form of chemotherapy at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to extend her life. But prognosis was that it only would postpone the inevitable.
At the suggestion of a Pittsburgh priest, Heibel began praying a novena in 2005 to Blessed Francis X. Seelos – a 19th-century Redemptorist pastor of her parish who died of yellow fever in 1867 in New Orleans. If you go down Magazine Street toward downtown you'll hit St. Andrews St. on which you turn right. You take a right at Constance St. and the Shrine of Blessed Seelos is on the left. (for more info: www.seelos.org) The shrine is located at historic St. Mary's Assumption Catholic Church. An interesting tidbit is that the novelist Anne Rice grew up going to this church and wrote about it in her latest autobiography, "Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession."
One week after she began the novena at her parish, Heibel’s cancer disappeared. Gone were tumors in both lungs, her liver, back and sternum. Her doctor could not believe it. And her doctors also told her that unexplained healing could not be the result of her chemotherapy. She was convinced that Blessed Seelos interceded on her behalf. Praise God!
Sometimes from our families and friends we hear miraculous stories like this where God interevenes powerfully. Hearing such stories, we are even more convinced that God can do all things and further convinces us that Jesus did powerful miracles as shown in today's Gospel. We read from the Gospel of Mark that Jesus performed two miracles: a woman who suffered years of internal hemorrhage was healed after she touched the clothes of Jesus and a dead child was brought back to life. Does it seem too far fetched for God to do this? Today our medical sciences is far more advanced than what they had in the time of Jesus, but those of you who had cancer know that even science is limited. When we face the stark reality that science has done all it can do for us, we then acknowledge that we need to implore the Divine Physician. So in humility we offer prayers like this. "Lord, you are all powerful yet compassionate. Look kindly upon your servant. If it is Your Will, You can heal me. Although I would like to spend more time here on earth, I submit to Your Will alone."
In all of us is a great desire to live. If we had our way, we would like to live forever. Our First Reading from the Book of Wisdom speaks of this desire that is in us.
God did not make death,
nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living...
For God formed man to be imperishable;
the image of his own nature he made him.
It is God's own design that we are to be imperishable. Yet why do we die? The Book of Wisdom says, "But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it." Here we see another kind of death. We may be alive in the eyes of the world, but in God's eyes we may be already dead spiritually through our sin. In comparison to physical death, spiritual death is far more grave, for it means that our life is severed from God who is our Way, the Truth, and the Life.
When you visit Blessed Seelos Shrine in New Orleans, you'll see an interesting statue in the museum. There sitting on a bronze bench is a statue of Blessed Seelos sitting as if he is waiting for someone to sit next to him and to begin conversation. In fact when he was alive, he frequently sat in the bench outside his rectory all throughout the night, often sleeping on that bench. Back then there were many of his parishioners who worked night shifts at the shipyard. Fr. Seelos wanted to be available to them for confession and counseling. He wanted to help people reconcile with God through reconciliation. Lack of sleep and comfort were his way of sacrificing for the sake of his parishioners receiving spiritual healing and eternal life. What a great man he was! We know all of us, even Mary Heibel who received healing through the intercession of Fr. Seelos, have to die physically one day. Jesus performed healing and continues to heal today not so that we may only live physically a little while longer. What's at stake is eternal life. Jesus heals in order that we may believe what He told us: repent and reconcile with God in order to enjoy eternal life with Him in the next. That's the kind of healing and transformation that Jesus would like to see in us.
