REFLECTIONS ON THE HEALING OF A LEPER (Mk 1: 40-45) XVI
Yesterday we were speaking about the “composition of place” that St. Ignatius of Loyola invites us to do before considering the mysteries of the life of Christ. We said that we should make an effort, with the grace of God, to depict in our minds and hearts the setting and the characters of the Biblical scene. We were also speaking about the “application of senses” that the founder of the Society of Jesus asks for: to see, hear, touch, feel, smell and experience the story with the immediacy of those who lived it in the first person.
Please allow me a digression today to bring back memories of an experience that I still have very fresh in my memory - my pilgrimage on foot through the Holy Land in 2018. Just two years ago today, on April 23, I began a route on my journey that is now known as the Jesus Trail. It derives its name from a verse in the Gospel of St. Matthew in which the Word of God states the following: “leaving Nazareth, [Jesus] settled in Capernaum, on the shores of the lake, in the borders of Zebulon and Naphtali” (Mt 4: 13). It is a route that connects the cities of Nazareth and Capernaum in Lower Galilee. The first day I reached Cana, where, through the intercession of his Mother, the Lord worked the miracle of the transformation of water into wine (Jn 2). From there, crossing small villages (kibbutzim and moshavimin Hebrew) it ends on the banks of the Kinneret, which is the current name of the Sea of Tiberias. It took me 4 days to cover the 40 miles of its route.
I have said over the last two days that “composition of place” is an imaginative representation. The truth is that, for people who have been in those places, it is not so much about imagining as it is about remembering what was seen in the Holy Land. If you have had the grace to walk the dusty paths of Galilee, what the Gospel tells us is inevitably contemplated, meditated and lived in a different way. I remember walking there among ancient olive trees and asking myself: "Lord, did you perhaps seek, in the shade of this tree, rest on your tireless trips through Galilee?" I remember getting my boots wet in a stream of freshwater near Nazareth and saying, "Jesus, did you ever stop to drink in this stream?" I also remember the first time I saw the Sea of Tiberias in the distance, on a rainy and gray day, and thought with enormous inner joy, “Surely, Lord, you also saw this same view, thissame landscape when you returned to your home in Capernaum after the encounter with the leper, or after one of your many missionary trips.” (Mk 2,1)
Whoever walks through Galilee unintentionally fills his eyes with a land that speaks all about the Lord. Now some words of St. John of the Cross come to mind in his Spiritual Canticle. The soul seeks the Bridegroom, who is Christ, and asks Creation: “O woods and thickets, planted by the hand of my Beloved! O green meadow, coated, bright, with flowers, tell me, has he passed by you?” Then, St. John of the Cross himself gives voice to nature in a most beautiful way in the response of the Created: "Pouring out a thousand graces, he has passed these groves in haste; and having looked at them, with his image alone, clothed them in beauty.”
It seems to me that during those days, in the silence of my wandering in Galilee, I had a similar dialogue with the creation that surrounded me. My soul, like that of the poem of the Mystical Doctor, also looked for Jesus Christ and asked in those “woods and thickets” if its Beloved had passed through them. Everything answered me in the same way: “Yes. The one you love passed by. He was here. We saw him many times, traveling with his companions, like a flock of cranes, twelve, formed in a triangle and, in front of all, at the tip, your Lord.”
As St. John of the Cross says, Jesus, the most beautiful of the sons of men (Ps 45:2), "with his image alone” clothed those places in beauty. He crossed thosevalleys, and saw those skies, and heard those birds, and went up those hills, and went down those mountains, and washed his hands in those waters, and sweated under the light of that harsh sun, and with the touch of his hands caressed thoseears, and, closing his eyes, he heard the murmur of that wind and ... it is as if something of Him had been left there, like someone who leaves their scent behind when leaving a room. Yes, Galilee still smells of Christ today ...
It is said that in the last days of his life, St. Ignatius spoke to the flowers on the terrace of his residence in Rome and said to them, "Do not speak so loudly to me, I am already listening to you." In those days, everything spoke to me very loudly: the flowers, the rain, the smell of the forests, the animals that came out on the road, the views ... I miss those days and, at the same time, I am infinitely grateful to God for granting them to me, without my deserving them.
Anyway, I've already taken too much time again. Hopefully one day everyone will have the opportunity to go to the Holy Land. Hopefully, everyone can spend a few days walking in contemplative silence through those places so that from then on, their "composition of place" takes on a new meaning. Hopefully, the imagination will be helped by memories, and remembrance of the places where the Son of God made flesh lived will help you to pray in another way.
For this, I ask the Lord today through the intercession of Mary.
