Live Well

 

I have been practicing the Ignatian form of meditative prayer which uses the imagination when reading scripture.  Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion came about when he was wounded in battle and during a lengthy convalescence the only thing his care givers could find for him to read were the scriptures and the lives of the saints.  After his recovery, he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and decided to become a priest.  He went to the University of Paris to study and while there founded what is known today as the Society of Jesus or the Jesuits.

 

Ignatius believed that our imagination and our senses were antennae by which we could encounter God in scripture.  His meditative form of prayer invites persons to imagine they are in the stories of the Old Testament and the Gospels.  Imagine the smell of the salt sea as Jesus teaches and feeds a crowd of five thousand at the water’s edge.  Imagine the stuffiness of a room crowded with people hungry to hear and experience Jesus.

 

When we use our senses and imagine ourselves in the stories of scripture, our life intersects the lives of the characters of the stories and we are told something about our own journey of faith.

 

The other day I was imagining myself in the story of the healing of the woman with a twelve year hemorrhage in Mark 5:25-34.  I imagined that I was the woman who had been suffering from a lengthy illness and that when I touched the back of Jesus’ garment that I could feel in my body in that instant that I had been healed.  I imagined being able to tell Jesus all about my struggle for spiritual health and healing--I was able as the story says to tell Jesus the whole truth.  But what was most powerful about placing myself in this story was Jesus’ words to the woman and to me, “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

 

The message for me in praying this scripture was that not only do I need to look to Jesus for my healing, but once I am healed I need to get on about the business of living well.  Being healed is only the beginning of the journey.  The hard work is learning how to live well after being sick for so long.  Imagine, the woman’s whole life had been dictated by her disease and going to doctors.  Now she was well and the challenge was living her life forward from that moment.

 

Prayer: God of imagination, word and deed.  Let me experience the power flowing out from your healing touch.  Let me move beyond my fear to acknowledge and accept your healing.  Give me courage to live well.  Amen