I recently have been providing support for a dear friend recovering from several health challenges. It has been an education about the pluses and minuses of our health care system as well as witnessing the strength and fragility of the human spirit. It has also been a time to encounter my own limits and strengths. It has especially been a time of prayer, patience and hope.

This experience has taken me back to my time as a hospital chaplain and the lessons learned and those I needed to remember. Then, when entering the patient’s room I tried to remind myself that I was entering into the suffering of another and was challenged to leave my “healthy” solutions at the door. Now it was the time to reverence another’s world of uncertainty and powerlessness and to offer a listening heart and supportive presence. In the words of St. Teresa of Avila: Christ has no body but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on the world. Yours are the hand with which He blesses the world.

The reflection on the experience of these past days takes place in anticipating the Marian feast of the Immaculate Conception, celebrating the belief that God’s saving grace touched Mary, the mother of Jesus, from the first moment of her existence and continued as God’s grace-filled presence for the rest of her life. It was that saving presence that enabled Mary to face the challenges of being the mother of Jesus, the Son of God, especially her powerlessness before the suffering and death of her son. Through it all, she loved with a mother’s heart, trusted in a faithful God, and truly embodied the prayer of Teresa. She is indeed Jesus’ “first” disciple and the model for all the disciples of Jesus.

-Fr. Dennis Lynch