Twenty-eighth Sunday – Ordinary Times Cycle C
Reflecting on Luke 17:11-19
Do you have a certain time in your life that is so indelibly marked in your heart that you return to it almost daily? For me that time is the fall of 2007, when a staph infection took me to the very limits of my strength. Those horrible months are all stamped in my memory: the screaming pain, the overwhelming nausea, and the second-by-second waits for the medication to start working. Those flashbacks return to me now, in this gorgeous fall of 2010, through the distinct sensory messengers of cooling days, leaves changing, and darkness descending earlier. And this is what that suffering has seared in me:
One returned and thanked him
Utter delight, every single time I drive myself anywhere in the car. Almost unbearable pleasure at the smell of apples falling from the trees. Laughing out loud as I walk by myself down the block in less than a minute, remembering the agony of trying to take even five steps at a time. The ecstasy of walking into the grocery story. The heavenly touch of those who love me.
But I think the most delicious experience of all is remembering, the endless remembering, of being brought back from the depths by the living Body of Christ―the hundreds of friends and family who took care of me through it all. There can never be enough words of gratitude. But it’s kind of a “cellular gratitude”. It’s not anything conscious. Pain dug a well that is now filled to overflowing with astonished gratitude. Like the cured Samaritan leper, I will give thanks while I live.
Sharing God’s Word at Home:
Have you reached a place of “cellular gratitude”?
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I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).