The Cross Walk to Thanks
There was a peace that emanated from the young woman who sat before me, although I also knew instinctively that she had been through hell and back.
Although some might call it a chance encounter that winter afternoon about ten years ago, I don’t believe these moments really are just a mere coincidence. Her story was told to me, so that her courageous faith – and the lived Gospel experience -- could be shared with you.
It is not an easy story to tell, and to be quite frank, one that would break your heart if you heard it in its entirety. It very well could make some walk away from the goodness of humanity, the Church and perhaps even God depending upon the state of one’s heart upon hearing it. And yet, the woman who shared her journey with me no longer sees it as a story of evil and hate, but one of hopefulness, healing and thankfulness.
For Jackie, it began years ago when she was a novice with a religious order somewhere in the Upper Midwest. She had always wanted to be a Sister and work with children experiencing homelessness and poverty, and she found a community of nuns where she just fit, like hand-in-glove. She loved the professed sisters and life they lived. She was happy there.
One evening as she was coming back from the community center where she had been tutoring, she was violently attacked and sexually assaulted by one of the teenagers she had just tutored the week before. She had loved this kid and kept his name in the front of the breviary she prayed each day. She believed in him and cheered him on. He chose to take her purity, her innocence and quite-nearly her physical life.
What followed were weeks of surgeries and prolonged hospitalization, trauma counseling, and seemingly endless interviews with police and the local juvenile system. Her religious community stayed by her side through it all, but when she returned to the convent and continued to experience the effects of post-traumatic stress, the Mother Superior told Jackie she must leave the order. “Now is not the time,” she said. “Find more healing first and then come back to us.”
Jackie was devastated. “This was all I ever wanted, and now I am made to feel like the leper,” she told me. “I left the convent feeling unwanted and unclean, and a big piece of me died in that moment of walking out the doors to an unknown future.”
I can see that image in my head, and I often think that this must have been exactly what the 10 lepers felt like as they cried out to Jesus for healing and weren’t immediately cured. They knew many others were instantly healed of their bodily afflictions – other lepers; the possessed on the Galilean hillsides; the hemorrhaging woman – so why not them? Why did they have to show themselves to the priests?
Ponder that moment: ten unclean and shunned persons who had the combination of courage and desperation to cry out to God for help, and nothing seemed to happen but a command to turn around and walk away from Jesus into the unknown.
How many times have we felt that way on our own journeys? In what ways have doors seemed to close when we wanted an immediate answer in our favor? In what ways did a prayer offered seem to result in a direction that didn’t make sense?
In that moment – similar to the story of Naaman the leper (from our first reading) – were the ten tempted to give-up? Were they dejected and angry? Did they grumble all the way down the road back to the Levitical priest who would be the only one permitted to declare them “officially” clean?
We don’t know how long that journey back to the priest took, but imagine the moment when an open sore on a leprous toe started to heal or the pus oozing from a disfigured nose dried up instantly. Think about the wonder and joy the ten began to experience when they realized that healing was coming to them, all because they cried out to Christ and obediently turned around, not knowing in that moment the ending of their story.
Oftentimes, healing comes when we walk in trust and faith in the darkness of the unknown, often out of obedience to the ways of God we don’t always understand.
When Jackie walked out of the convent that day, she was obedient to the will of the Father who didn’t abandon her as she went back home to figure out what was next. “I cried a lot,” she shared. Depression hit hard. She stopped praying and going to church, at least in the first few weeks. But, she said, God never gave up on her.
Doors eventually opened in ways Jackie didn’t expect. New friends came into her life; a boyfriend, too. She found a therapist back East who brought clarity in a way no one else had. She began writing, a passion that helped her heal. Each week, her mom would gently invite her to go to Mass with her, and begrudgingly she did at first. She felt nothing. There was still anger and resentment. But she went.
For Jackie, for the lepers, and for us, healing often happens when we do the hard work of trusting God’s ways in the unknown. No doubt, there have been times in our lives – or there will be – when nothing makes sense and God seems silent; when the pain of the Cross is heavy and we don’t know how we can go on another day; when we just aren’t sure if we will ever find healing and wholeness again.
In those moments, Jesus says: go and show. Keep walking forward in obedience to the One who heals as each of us journeys in hope and trust during the storm. When it comes right down to it, isn’t this the story of every Resurrection account from the Gospels? A lost, frightened disciple comes to find a new beginning after the Cross leads to healing, light and freedom. When we carry the Cross we’ve been given – especially when it is the darkness of a raging storm and we don’t fully understand – God is working out His healing love for us. The leprosy (in whatever form it takes in our lives) is healed and used (“go and show”) to help others in ways and times we least expect.
And this, in the end, should lead to one final destination: the road of thankfulness, which is the fullness of living the Eucharist. It is the road that leads us deeper – and back – into the Merciful Heart of Christ. No doubt the other 9 who were healed along the way back home were happy at what was offered to them, but only one – an outsider at that – knew that for full joy and complete healing to take place, he had to come back to thankfulness, which means coming back to a real relationship with Christ. The one former sick man who returned to Jesus realized that the Cross of leprosy – and the healing journey of obedience – could only be fully lived and transformed from a place of Eucharistic love.
When we come to the Table of the Eucharist having carried our crosses out of obedience and trust, we find everything our hearts have been seeking. We find true and lasting Love.
For Jackie, it took time and it was often messy, but she was able to find wholeness and a new mission from the journey she took from the sexual assault and convent rejection to the place of thankfulness from which she now lives.
She was blunt: “I’ll always carry the wounds of what that young man did, but I don’t hate him. I still pray for him. He was broken, too, and in that brokenness, he took it out on me.”
Jackie also now counsels other women who have suffered assault and abuse, and her writing has brought healing to many who still live in the shadow of trauma and hate. She was honest: “I know I can never say I was thankful for what happened, but I can say I am truly thankful that my Cross has been used to help others who carry their own. I am thankful that God has not left me, and in fact, strengthened me through what seemed to be dead ends. I am thankful that His Presence in the Mass and Confession continues to heal my wounds.”
And that, in the end, is living Eucharistic thankfulness.