Spiritual Lepers

This was going to be an article for our upcoming newsletter, but alas, too much content for a small space. Might as well post it here.  About a month ago I was reading the section I talk about below and got so excited to share this insight that I bolted to the desk and typed out this article.  Enjoy!

What do Murray and Calcutta have in common?  Can what we’re doing together to impact the college scene in America hold a candle to what the Missionaries of Charity are doing world-wide?  Mother Teresa believes it can and so do I, and I hope you do as well.

We are exactly where we need to be serving the poorest of the poor!  I’ve been rereading book by Shane Claiborne called The Irresistable Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, and there’s a passage that especially struck me this time.  He’s reflecting on a 10-week stint he did in Calcutta, serving the people there with Bl. Mother Theresa and the Missionaries of Charity.  He’d just spent three weeks living and working in a leper colony and he writes this about his thought process as he’s getting on the plane home:

“Mother Teresa always said, ‘Calcuttas are everywhere if we only have eyes to see.  Find your Calcutta.’ I was ready to come home.  I knew my Calcutta was in the United States... I learned from the lepers that leprosy is a disease of numbness.  The contagion numbs the skin, and the nerves can no longer feel as the body wastes away... To treat it, we would dig out or dissect the scarred tissue until the person could feel again.  As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness.  Could we learn to feel again?”

Wow, right?  I’m blown away by this reflection.  What if a simple act of acknowledgement acted as the the Divine Phyician’s scalpul that dissected some “scar tissue” and brought some feeling back into a spiritual leper’s life?  We just have to make that extra effort to give that much more of ourselves.

There are spiritually destitute souls floundering around this society that I have not learned to love nearly enough!  If I loved like Christ loved I would be compelled to stop everyone that walked by me on campus just to get to know them and show them their human dignity by taking an interest in them for even a few minutes.  They’re the love of Jesus’ life, every one of the students passing me by on the sidewalks, and they are all very worth getting to know.

No greater love has a man than to lay his life down for his friends (Jn 15:13), right?  I feel like I’m still holding pretty tightly onto my life. Can any of you relate?  I’m ready to start giving it out. Will you join me?  Let’s go heal some lepers together!!

-Zach