The Touch of God in a Distanced World

“Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand, touched him, and said to him, ‘I do will it. Be made clean.’” (Mk 1:41)

Keep six feet apart.  Wear double-masks.  Take a shower right away.  Wash your underwear.  Spray your belt.  These prescriptions are to bar infection of the COVID virus and not to be contagious.

Against leprosy, the Jewish community had defensive and noninteractive measures… Yet, Jesus “stretched out his hand and touched” (Mk 1:41) the leper.  Jesus removed considerations of defilement and readmitted this man into community.

This miracle is not just biblical history – it continues to live on from that cured man’s proclamation… “He went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the new” (Mk 1:45).

The Good News is for everyone.  The Word must be contagious – more than the coronavirus!  And we, too, are to be contagious!  While we cleanse in the shower of the sacraments; daily, we are re-exposed to the Word in the Divine Office and the Mass.

In the queue of choir stalls, “without money and without price” (Is 55:1), God vaccinates us – emboldens us to stretch out our prayers to others… Do not vaccines contain some measure of contagion?  This vaccination of the Word contains the living, filly virulent Jesus Christ!  From it, we receive the capability to spread his message abroad…

May Jesus’ Way become infectious, we pray:
May newborns, parents, families, and the elderly be carriers;
May educators, students and scholars be deliverers;
May policemen, firemen, and government representatives be diffusers;
May the sick, poor, homeless and unemployed be catching;
May medical personnel and environmentalists be transmitters;
And may Cistercian monks and nuns be bearers.

Our contemplative apostolate is to the be voice and touch of God… Through the shower of our unceasing prayer; with living water, every part of us being washed from the inside out; girded with belted sincerity and truth, may we be his interveners in this historical time of need…

Then in God’s time, let everyone in the world, with “unveiled face[s], be changed into his likeness, from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord who is Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).