Pulled Out of Exile
“If you wish, you could make me clean,” said the leper who had risked coming out from his legal exile to find Jesus (Mark 1:40).
The exile was supposed to be a quarantine, as we heard in today’s first reading (Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46). When someone is contagious, it makes sense to keep them away to protect the others. But my mind wandered off into contemplation of separations that are internal as well as external.
When I spent a summer working and interning at ABC News, I was amazed at how many people there are in New York. It took me two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. I drove part of the way in a congested line of cars to the park and ride, crammed myself into a packed bus headed to the Port Authority and then stuffed myself into a subway car so I would only walk a couple of blocks on the crowded sidewalks to ABC. In each two-hour ordeal, I was entirely surrounded by people. And I was entirely alone.
No one is really interacting on a highway, unless someone is overcome by road rage. Everyone is facing forward on the bus so interaction is mostly unnatural. But I really noticed how almost everyone looked at phones or books or the ground or the ads in the subways and subway stations to avoid interaction. Hundreds of people are together alone.
I think there are many people who live like this in general. We are packed into groceries and work places and even church, but many people go a long time without interacting in shallow ways, let alone deep ones. Still, we all hunger to be known in deep places.
What does it take to have authentic relationships? I think the world is in great need of these.
The leper dared to approach Jesus, the famous one who had this miraculous and incredulous ability to heal. But more than just a physical healing, Jesus means for there to be an encounter, an authentic relationship. Jesus knows that even more than wanting physical relief, we want to be known. He invites us to become aware of His very personal desire for us and then be brought back into community in an authentic way.
I spent a lot of my Mass today looking at the tabernacle, feeling I needed to ask the Lord for people to be healed in relationship. Whether married or single, in church or out of church, well or unwell, working or not working, outwardly among people or away from them, I think many people are terribly lonely. I pray for the things that hold us back, externally and internally. I hope we will have the courage to ask Christ if He wills to make us well in relationships so we can hear, “I do will it (Mark 1:41).”