The Entire Thought

“He Cured Many Who Were Sick"

Being reborn in Jesus is not rapid for many of us. It is a quiet, gentle growth, like the growth of the child in the womb of his mother and like his gradual growth in knowledge, affection, physical strength, and understanding after birth. The healing power of the Spirit is a quiet, gentle power. He makes die in us all the fears, the desires to possess or to destroy, the hurts and the frustrations, all the power which wants to dominate. There is a growth in the power of listening, the power of
compassion, of patience, of learning to wait for the hour of God. We learn to surrender to the power of the Spirit and the power of God, to stop agitating, to let God take over our lives, to abandon
ourselves to the Supreme Healer.
Jesus manifests himself as he walks through Judea, when he comes to give sight to the blind, to enable the lame man to walk, and the deaf to hear. All these are essentially symbols of something much deeper. He opens the eyes of the heart, so that we begin to see reality as it is, so that we see our wounded brothers, see their anguish. He opens our ears, for just as we see but are blind to reality, so we hear but do not listen. There is a fundamental healing that must take place before we really can listen to the music of reality, before we can listen to people without fear, before we can listen to the Spirit.
Jesus the Healer comes when we are conscious that we need a healer; when we become conscious of our own egoism, all the anarchy of desire, all the fears, all the cowardice and
weakness, all the need for human security that incites us to possess. It is only when we become conscious of our weakness and our fears that we can begin to grow in union with the Spirit.


Jean Vanier
(Jean Vanier is the founder of L’Arche,
an international network of communities for the mentally disabled)



In his poem, “Fever," John Updike, in an almost playful way, tells about one facet of the inner healing
that may accompany sickness:

I have brought back a good
message from the land of 102 degrees:
God exists.
I had seriously doubted it before;
but the bedposts spoke of it with utmost
confidence,
the threads in my blanket took it for granted,
the trees outside the window dismissed all
complaints,
and I have not slept so justly for years.
It is hard, now, to convey
how emblematically appearances sat
upon the membranes of my consciousness;
but it is truth long known,
that some secrets are hidden from health.
(Collected Poems, 1953-1993 [New York: Knopf, 1993] 28)

Entire list of Thoughts While Pastoring