A couple of years back I became friends with someone at my parish in Pflugerville in her early 40s…she was battling a disease called Scleroderma…it’s a disease of…for lack of a better explanation…petrified skin. Her skin had been getting harder and harder…less and less malleable…kind of like the exoskeleton of a lobster or a crab. And so there came a point when her fingers couldn’t bend any more…her arms became rigid at the elbow unable to operate as they’re designed…her legs unable to bend and thus unable to help her walk. And there’s no known cure. Yesterday I spent a few minutes with our friend Mary Coco. A few weeks back she broke her other hip and it’s not healing. Many of you know Mary well. She’s still as sharp as ever in her mind but her body is breaking down and she can’t stop it from happening and it’s very frustrating. Most of us know our good friend Robert Trevino. I didn’t ask him if I could talk about his battle…but from what I’ve observed…and I don’t think he would mind. Robert’s battle with advanced Diabetes is really his ministry. He goes in three times a week and brings this gospel message from Christ the King…he brings my homilies to his friends receiving dialysis…which as you could imagine is pretty humbling.

I don’t have an explanation for illness. I don’t know the exact moment in history when Diabetes came to be a part of the human experience…or when Scleroderma first took hold of someone’s body…or who the first paralytic was. If God created everything…and he did…and if everything he created was good…and it is...then how did the chaos of illness come into the world? How did something so contrary to the way we were created…In the image and likeness of God’s perfection…become part of life? How can place meaning on something so out of our control like human illness? Because I surely never have been able to lay my hands on someone and have them pick up their mat and walk. In my four and a half years of being a priest…I have yet to cure anyone of Cancer. And it’s not like we’ve had the astounding experience of the ceiling magically opening so that a paralytic might be lowered down in our midst for healing. Our gospel today…the Leper last week…Matthew’s mother the week before…are these just pretty stories of a bygone time when Jesus walked the earth? Or is the answer right in our very midst…and it’s just that we can’t see it?

The fact is…our paralysis goes beyond just physical calamities. How broken and sick has our world become? Just look around…beyond the incurable illnesses…we’re beset by good and smart and effective people who are unemployed…holy families who’ve had to foreclose on their homes in recent times…marriages on the verge of disintegration…children yelling at their parents and parents yelling at their children…bosses unwilling to lead and employees unwilling to follow. Have you seen the news in these past few years? People bizarrely having 8 babies at once…politicians backstabbing instead of building up a nation…Islam in the east versus Modernity in the West. It’s obvious we are ill…living in chaos and dis-order…far from being whole…far from being one body healed of all division. In so many ways we are all helplessly paralyzed. And so again I ask what do we do? Where can we go to sort out some meaning in the chaos? This is an important question…at least it us for me…because those of us who are struck by these situations surely could use a cure and those of us who live among these situations surely could use an explanation.

Here’s what I’ve come up with. The broad landscape of helplessness that…if you really pay attention…exists in our world is actually not about despair. Diabetes is not about despair. Broken Hips on our grandmothers is not about despair…neither is Scleroderma or unemployment or broken relationships or bossy moms & dads or willful sons & daughters. It’s not despair…it’s actually the beginning of health. Anyone who has ever fought an addiction will tell you that the healing can only begin with the admission of helplessness. In fact it could be said that we are all sick until we’ve been brought to our knees and made aware that true healing cannot happen in our lives without God. Our prayers for healing…for unity…for reconciliation are only possible when they come out of our helplessness. Until we’re helpless we will always rely on our own abilities which clearly can’t solve these crises in our world…otherwise they already would have.
Recently I was reading something about the religious group The Quakers. You may not know…but in Quaker communities there isn’t a liturgy per say like we have here in the Mass. What they do is simply gather in a room and sit with each other in total silence praying to God to do for them what they cannot do for themselves…namely…give them order in a world of chaos…healing in a world of illness…meaning in a world that seems void of meaning. Their silence is their admission of their helplessness. And that’s pretty healthy. They don’t presume to have the answers.

It’s exactly why you and I are here today. If we had the answers to the illnesses of our lives there’d be no reason to be here. If Scleroderma didn’t exist…if marriages never failed…if children always obeyed and parents always listened…if candidates would lead rather than lambaste each other...if there were no foreclosures…no meth labs in our town…no alcoholism in our families…then we wouldn’t need Mass. But we know that these painful things do exist right in our very midst.

Of everything possible that might give us the answers to our chaotic lives…Science…Medicine…Psychology…Philosophy…Money…of all the possible solutions…there’s only one that that stands as the ground on which our knees rest once we finally allow ourselves to fall. The Eucharist. I said this last week…we don’t have to be here…we need to be here. The Eucharist is the ultimate prayer of helplessness asking God to give us the ability to powerfully stand on our own on His ground.

I suppose that if asked…we would all answer that the 1^st Eucharist was the Last Supper…when Jesus blessed and broke the bread and gave it to his Disciples. But I wonder…as we continue to read healing story after healing story in our gospels…maybe they are the real Eucharist accounts in scripture. This is what happens at Eucharist…Jesus takes us…sick as we are…he comes into contact with us…He absorbs that sickness and then transforms it and gives it back as health. He takes our bitterness…holds it…transforms it gives it back as joy. He takes chaos and then gives it back as order. He takes anxiety and gives it back as confidence. The Eucharist is the very same thing as the healing we’ve just heard. We cannot heal ourselves…obviously…so we must turn our helplessness toward the Eucharist which can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. In ten minutes we will come to communion and I wish we could hear the silent prayers of each other as we cue up to receive the Eucharist…I wonder what would we hear...Lord if you want me to be a good priest…you have to help me…I cannot do it on my own. Lord if you want me to be a good teacher…you’ll have to make it happen…I cannot do it on my own. Lord if you want me to be a salesman…a bookkeeper…a delivery man…a cashier at HEB…a doctor…a secretary…a construction worker…a good student…a loving wife…a honorable husband…a strong disciple…you have to help me…I cannot do it on my own. When we finally admit that we cannot do it on our own…that’s when we’ve finally arrived at a mature understanding of the Eucharist.