Seeking Healing

AMDG

I, a fool in love, graced to hear God in scripture, word, and prayer, to you, the kind soul who will listen to and walk with me.

Recently, over a period of only a few days, I witnessed the stories from scripture of many unclean people. At the same time, I have been wrestling with my own role in bringing myself and other transgender Catholics into full, consummate communion with the church. I started writing in the middle of it, and here is how God brought it together.

Unclean Figures

The first person I encountered was the Hemorrhaging Woman. Following a special reading from Mark 5, the preacher dug into the woman’s suffering, pointing out that she had probably not been able to come to church for 12 years due to her condition. After her healing, when Jesus asked who touched him, she had to overcome both “tears and fears:” it was a scandal for her to be out and worse that she had touched the Teacher, making him unclean. She had to confront her shame and embarrassment as well as the potential consequences.

Later that week I watched a Friar Review of “The Chosen” (I hadn’t seen any episodes yet) in which Jesus is out with some of his disciples when a leper approaches him for healing. This man approached Jesus after who knows how many attempts to be healed, in great longing and weariness and yet strong in his faith and perseverance. As Fathers Patrick and Casey point out, the man’s faith in seeking the miracle is substantively different—and arguably better—than the faith which follows the miracle.

Finally came the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the first reading, Naaman is cleansed of his leprosy. Naaman was a gentile who seemingly had some prestige until he contracted leprosy, which likely undermined everything and left him marginalized. Naaman makes the journey to the holy man of the God of Israel to seek healing. The Gospel reading was the Ten Lepers. Like the one leper from the Chosen, these ten knew about God’s mercy and knew about Jesus’s authority, so they sought him out. They sought him in humility, need, and obedience. The preacher even asked in his homily, “who are the pariahs in our communities today?” Naaman praised the God of Israel after he was healed, and Jesus sent the lepers to the church.

Waiting for a Savior

There are different ways to beat a system. Sometimes it’s by rising to the top or breaking walls. With my quest for religious brotherhood, although I was certainly open to God smashing down walls, I thought that the likeliest way to succeed would be to slip through the cracks. A few other trans men, it seems, have even taken this method as far as entering seminary or formation. Against the institution of the church, with its massive size, immense age, and tectonic pace of change, I saw myself as factually powerless. I was also meek. Timid. When I received my rejection from the Jesuits, I still did not see it as my place to raise an objection. I placed that duty upon the vocations director and even somewhat upon my vocation mentor (a rank and file Jesuit).

At the outset of my discernment I had considered both the Franciscans and the Jesuits, and as the pain from the Jesuits dulled the glimmer of the Franciscans began to catch my eye. To celebrate the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, I visited a parish which was not only run by Franciscans but which also hosted a seminary for Franciscans in formation. On my way there I became conscious of my intent. I was hoping to be found. Just as I had hoped that the Jesuits would recognize my merit and my calling and make a way, so now was I daydreaming about reclining in a college courtyard and the holy spirit pointing me out to the novices or professors like the young David to Samuel. I was waiting for my knight, my champion. A few days later, I had the very same fantasy when our bishop made a visit to my parish. I daydreamed that the holy spirit would highlight me to him, and he would talk to me after mass, and a path forward would unfold.

But the unclean did not wait to be saved. They went to Jesus.

Jesus Heals

And Jesus healed them all.

I, too, desired the healing. Repenting of my laziness, I was ready and willing to seek Jesus. Yet how did this translate to my real life? I tried praying through it: I saw myself coming to Jesus in the stony streets, at dusk, alone. I smelled the dust and the sweat. I heard the voices of neighbors over the walls. When I asked for healing, Our Lord told me, “You are already healed. Go, and show yourself in the temple.”

This confused me. Nothing had changed. What healing was I expecting? What did any of it mean? I brought my conundrum to my spiritual director, who asked: what does it look like to be healed? What was wounded?

I saved these questions and brought them with me on a walk. When I was finally ready to unwrap them, watching the last of the sunlight burn up the autumn foliage across a pond, the answers came clearly. What is wounded? Wounded is my relationship with the church. I am fully in the church, active, alive, and welcome, yet burdened as if by heavy chains. Blocked from certain spaces. The healing I seek is for that weight, that limitation, that difference, to be gone. After I had seen this, Jesus gave me to understand that the one who needs the healing is the church. I am already there. Already healed. Already at the table of reconciliation.

When I started writing this post, I did not have the answers. Yet all week I have been awash in God’s love, inspired with hope for the church, and at peace about the work God is leading me to. If God has placed me here, and even shown me a vision of the table of reconciliation, then I will make it my work to bring others to the table, one by one, to heal the wounds.

Please pray for me, for the church, and those who have preceded us in death. Let me know how I can pray for you.

God’s love,

Your Other Brother

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