14th Week OT (T)
Fr. Philip Neri Powell, OP
St. Dominic Priory, NOLA
One
of God's gifts to us – just one among many that marks us out from
His creatures as rational animals – is our ability to communicate
with one another through the spoken and written word. A philosophy
professor of mine, a former Jesuit, used to yell us in class: “If
you can't write it, you can't think it! And vice-versa.”
So indicative of our rationality is the use of language that some
ethicists have proposed that its absence renders one fatally
non-human, not a
person at all.
Catholics won't that far, but it doesn't surprise us that the
possessed in our Gospel accounts are all painted as insanely violent
or mute or blind, or some combination of the three. Attacking the
created imago Dei
is exactly what we would expect the demonic to do. When Jesus rebukes
the demons, sending them out, he restores to the possessed that which
makes them most like God – their intellectual faculties, their
ability to think and speak. He does this out of compassion, out of an
abundance of love for those for whom he will die on the cross. As
Dominican friars, we can ask ourselves, “Does my preaching and
teaching bring healing to those who have lost their grip on the
reality of who and what they were created and re-created to be?” We
are sent as laborers among an abundant harvest, and Christ's
compassion for God's people goes with us. To the troubled and
abandoned, we can bring freedom and healing, and at the same time,
witness ourselves freed and healed.
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