Healing Prayer as Penance

“Spend 10 or 15 minutes praying for healing.”

It doesn’t sound much like penance. Unless you’re me. Because the idea of healing frustrates me.

It’s not even that I’m a hyper rationalist and think it’s impossible. Just the fact that some people are healed and some aren’t – and there’s a part of me that couldn’t bear to be healed if those around me weren’t – though who am I kidding? I’m not really that altruistic. I’d probably jump at the chance if I could.

But what really keeps me back is the disappointment. The fact that God hasn’t healed my OCD and depression. That even beginning to hope for it might mean setting myself up for even deeper disappointment. Better to have an arrangement with God. If I convince myself he hasn’t promised to touch me (I say to myself), then I won’t be disappointed when he doesn’t. And so I don’t pray for healing – except in this case it was the penance I was given.

“Can you do that?” asked the priest.

“Yes,” I nodded hesitantly.

“Fuck,” I thought.

And so there I found myself, meditating on the day’s gospel, the healing of the boy with the demon that would throw him into fire or water – the homily that touched my heart even in spite of the priest’s well-meaning attempts to explain through medical terms what nonetheless remains obscure because names are not the same as comprehension.

I prayed my penance in the small chapel in Geddes Hall at Notre Dame University, and wondered what it might be to ask – to beg for eyes to see fire and water – to see the beauty of a burnished lake at sunset rather than a body of water offering the promise of drowning, to feel the warmth of a campfire with friends in the pines rather than the temptation of a blaze that could become a pyre. I prayed these things. Did God answer? It’s hard to know.

“I ask God for what I desire,” we pray in Ignatian prayer, “for the grace…” and then we fill in the blanks. It’s a curious prayer, because it’s not as though we always precisely do desire these things intuitively, but it’s not as though we’re talking about something other than spontaneous affection either – not as though we’re conjuring forced emotions. We ask God for what we desire – what we wish to desire – what we wish we wish we could desire – and we trust that somehow there is a response requiring discernment, a riddle to be pondered.

It’s as different on one hand from the “healings” of the prosperity gospel as it is on the other hand from the resigned and unexpectant cynicism of hopelessness. I ask God for what I desire – the grace of healing. I ask God for what I desire – the grace to see water and fire – the lakes and rivers and campfires and the sun – and to know them good. Ī ask God for what I desire – if you’re willing, Lord, be the healer of my sight. Baptism and tongues we have seen, O Lord, but quicken me now– my portion a keenness of spark and the cleanse of rain.