Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

Can we let ourselves be forgiven? Can we let ourselves experience the wholeness of self that Jesus offers?

When we make ourselves beholden to our mistakes, defined by some character trait we see as limiting, caught up in our failures… we are not letting ourselves be who we are called to be.

Can we become learners of our experiences instead? To bring ourselves to be forgiven is to let ourselves learn from our mistakes, we become aware of the strengths that dwell within our weaknesses, we can understand ourselves to be on a journey of learning.

Today we have Jesus encountering a man who has waited, longed, to enter a place of wholeness for years. He has a whole set of expectations of what will be involved to do that—he must wait for a pool to stir, he must be the first to reach it when this happens, everyone else is getting there first time after time.

His request of Jesus is not to be healed but to have assistance meeting the expectations for healing he has set. Jesus’ response is to provide him healing.

We return to the Lord’s Prayer as we bring our heart to orient on God. We bring our longings to the basic needs we have for the day. We allow ourselves to be open to others being transformed to wholeness in Jesus. And now we allow ourselves to be present to that same transformation in ourselves.

The Lord’s Prayer calls us to place aside whatever expectations we have about what we must do to be healed and let Jesus bring that healing, that wholeness, into our lives.

Pax,

— Ben