REFLECTIONS ON THE HEALING OF A LEPER (Mk 1: 40-45) XV
Yesterday we mentioned the importance of what St. Ignatius of Loyola calls “composition of place” when it comes to meditation on the mysteries of the life of Christ. In fact, we want to use this in order to take full advantage of the treasures hidden in the story of the healing of the leper so that we can draw light from it for our own lives.
By using “composition of place” and with the grace of the Holy Spirit, we can more deeply understand the imaginative representation of the gospel scene on which we are preparing to meditate. We must picture the details of the “scene” in which this event in the life of Jesus occurs.
For this, we must do what St. Ignatius calls “application of the senses”. We have to SEE the people who appear in the story. OBSERVE what they are doing, their gestures, their looks, their reactions. HEAR what they say. FEEL what they experienced. SMELL the scents that they breathed. We have to spend time “imagining” the place, the faces, and thinking even about the space in its smallest details.
These senses are "spiritual senses" for two reasons. The first is that by putting ourselves in the presence of God in a prayerful attitude, it is the Holy Spirit who works in our faculties, and who directs us in the contemplation. You might think that this "composition of place" is very artificial because it is an exercise in the imagination, that we are, so to speak, making up the scene. The reality is that THE TRUTH of what the Gospel tells us is recreated within us by the action of the Holy Spirit and, therefore, in that interior representation, sanctifying grace is already acting.
But also they are "spiritual senses" because they are senses of the soul, not so much of the body. Yes, it is necessary to SEE, LISTEN, TOUCH, SMELL, TASTE, but with the heart and soul, more than with the body and, thus, St. Ignatius tells us to CONTEMPLATE the ugliness of sin, or to SMELL and TASTE the sweetness of the love of God, or feel TOUCHED by the love of God.
Therefore, this initial “composition of place” is already a synergy between the use of our faculties and the prompting of the Holy Spirit that travels through centuries of history and over very long distances and transports us to the precise moment in which the biblical event happened. It is something divine and wonderful.
In the telling of the healing of the leper, I invite you to make this first effort. After invoking the Holy Spirit, begin to unfold the landscape: where did the meeting between the Lord and this poor man take place? On the road? In the sun or in the shade of a tree? When did it happen? Maybe in the spring? Can you smell the flowers of the field? Feel the breeze on your face? Hear the birds singing? And who are the people in this picture? The story tells us only about Jesus and this sick person, but are the disciples also there? If so, we must see them, look at the gestures they make when they see the leper arrive. In a special way, we have to imagine this sick man, his face eaten by disease, smelly, poor, ragged, humiliated. Try to see his face: the dull eyes, the rotten skin, and reflected in all of that, his fear, his despair, his inner pain and, yet, at the same time, his hope that Jesus "if he wants" (Mk 1:40), can heal him.
Of course, we must contemplate above all, Jesus who is the center of the scene: his clothing, the tone of his most beautiful voice, his composure and, above all, his gaze. The Gospel of St. Mark is the Gospel of the gaze of Christ because so many times, it tells us the way the Lord looked at someone, with anger, or with love, or with mercy, or with sadness.
We will do this as we move forward in the commentary on this episode, but as homework for today, you can begin thinking about it. The more details and more care you put into this first stage of “composition of place”, the more profitable your contemplation of the scene will be. It will always be much more than a theoretical reflection. It will be a living experience, as it was for the leper, that can also heal us of the leprosy in which we find ourselves.
