The Leprosy of My Heart

My wife would not hesitate to tell you that I have a very low tolerance for pain or discomfort. If I’m sick, hungry, or even if I just have a mild headache, I am very much dead weight to my wife and to my sons.

 

Some forms of working out (aka all of them) are difficult for me because of my intolerance for pain. I admire and respect anyone who exercises regularly because they have developed the patience, self-discipline and endurance that I lack. They can welcome the pain that strengthens their body, while also obediently listening to their body in order to avoid self-injury.

 

Pain can be a good thing. It protects us and makes us stronger. It helps us avoid damage to ourselves. So why do I shy away from pain and discomfort? Why do I prefer numbness over pain - especially when I self-medicate with my drugs of choice: Netflix, Social Media, and late-night Oreos?

 

Leprosy is a disease that can result in the inability to feel pain and can lead to the loss of extremities due to repeated injuries or infection due to unnoticed wounds. As I age, there is a numbness that has slowly crept into my heart. I’ve become desensitized to the realities faced by those who suffer violence, poverty, and injustice, especially the poor and marginalized of our city, our country, and our world. Where there is a numbness in my heart, there should be heartache.

 

I am a hypocrite whenever I respond to the suffering of others by looking away, ignoring them, or judging them, sometimes harshly, in order to justify my own inaction. Our sick, our dying, our homeless, our imprisoned, our hungry, our thirsty - as their number and frequency increases, my numbness to their pain spreads and deepens my leper-like isolation from them. (And by “them”, I should really mean “us”).

 

How can I close this gap and reverse my self-isolation from the marginalized? The margins can go away if I go to the margins. So where do we begin?

 

In today’s Gospel according to Matthew, we hear from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount - Jesus tells us that he has come “not to abolish but to fulfill” the Law. He is laying the groundwork for when he later discusses the greatest commandment – all of the rules and laws summarized in one phrase: Love your neighbor as yourself.

 

And this is difficult for me because of how easily and frequently I choose to put myself before others. Part of my prayer recently has been “Lord, help me to love others more than I love myself” because I know that I cannot allow God remove the numbness of my heart if I continue to exercise His greatest commandment so poorly.

 

And this is where our Lenten practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving should come in.

• Prayer exercises away my self-isolation. My prayer has become less about reaching out to God and more about allowing God to reach out to me.
• Fasting pains away my numbness. Fasting allows me to share in the discomfort that afflicts others and moves my heart to bring comfort to the afflicted.
• Almsgiving excercises my heart. Giving of my time, my talent, and my treasure to the needs of others reminds me that my life is a gift, my life is not my own, and the love that I have received is to be shared with others, primarily with those on the margins, and especially those who are difficult for me to love.

--

 

Spring 2018 Waco Poverty Simulation

Lord, who throughout these forty days

for us did fast and pray,

teach us to overcome our sins

and close by you to stay.

 

As you with Satan did contend,

and did the victory win,

O give us strength in you to fight,

in you to conquer sin.

 

As you did hunger and did thirst,

so teach us, gracious Lord,

to die to self, and only live

by your most holy Word.

 

And through these days of penitence,

and through your Passiontide,

for evermore, in life and death,

O Lord, with us abide.

 

Abide with us, that when this life

of suffering is past,

an Easter of unending joy

we may at last attain!

 

Author: Joe Nava, Mathematics Department