Tending Our Own Wounds First

Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care.   As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away.     But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others.

When we experience the healing presence of another person, we can discover our own gifts of healing.     Then our wounds allow us to enter into a deep solidarity with our wounded brothers and sisters.

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Listening With Our Wounds

To enter into solidarity with a suffering person does not mean that we have to talk with that person about our own suffering.   Speaking about our own pain is seldom helpful for someone who is in pain.   A wounded healer is someone who can listen to a person in pain without having to speak about his or her own wounds.   When we have lived through a painful depression, we can listen with great attentiveness and love to a depressed friend without mentioning our experience.   Mostly it is better not to direct a suffering person’s attention to ourselves.   We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole beings.   That is healing.

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A Time to Receive and a Time to Give

It is important to know when we can give attention and when we need attention.   Often we are inclined to give, give, and give without ever asking anything in return.   We may think that this is a sign of generosity or even heroism.   But it might be little else than a proud attitude that says:   “I don’t need help from others.   I only want to give.”   When we keep giving without receiving we burn out quickly.   Only when we pay careful attention to our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs can we be, and remain, joyful givers.

There is a time to give and a time to receive.   We need equal time for both if we want to live healthy lives.

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Becoming Food For the World

When Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, he summarized in these gestures his own life.   Jesus is chosen from all eternity, blessed at his baptism in the Jordan River, broken on the cross, and given as bread to the world.   Being chosen, blessed, broken, and given is the sacred journey of the Son of God, Jesus the Christ.

When we take bread, bless it, break it, and give it with the words “This is the Body of Christ,” we express our commitment to make our lives conform to the life of   Christ.   We too want to live as people chosen, blessed, and broken, and thus become food for the world

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Being Chosen

Jesus is taken by God or, better, chosen by God.   Jesus is the Chosen One.   From all eternity God has chosen his most precious Child to become the saviour of the world.   Being chosen expresses a special relationship, being known and loved in a unique way, being singled out.   In our society our being chosen always implies that others are not chosen.   But this is not true for God.     God chooses his Son to reveal to us  our  chosenness.

In the Kingdom of God there is no competition or rivalry.   The Son of God shares his chosenness with us.   In the Kingdom of God each person is precious and unique, and each person has been given eyes to see the chosenness of others and rejoice in it.

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Being Blessed

Jesus is the Blessed One.   When Jesus was baptised in the Jordan river a voice came from heaven saying:   “You are my Son, the Beloved;   my favour rests on you” (Mark 1:11).   This was the blessing that sustained Jesus during his life.   Whatever happened to him – praise or blame – he clung to his blessing; he always remembered that he was the favourite child of God.

Jesus came into the world to share that blessing with us.   He came to open our ears to the voice that also says to us, “You are my beloved son, you are my beloved daughter, my favour rests on you .”   When we can hear that voice, trust in it, and always remember it, especially during dark times, we can live our lives as God’s blessed children and find the strength to share that blessing with others.

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Being Broken

Jesus was broken on the cross.   He lived his suffering and death not as an evil to avoid at all costs, but as a mission to embrace.     We too are broken.   We live with   broken bodies, broken hearts, broken minds or broken spirits.   We suffer from broken relationships.

How can we live our brokenness?   Jesus invites us to embrace our brokenness as he embraced the cross and live it as part of our mission.   He asks us not to reject our brokenness as a curse from God that reminds us of our sinfulness but to accept it and put it under God’s blessing for our purification and sanctification.   Thus our brokenness can become a gateway to new life.

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Being Given

Jesus is given to the world.   He was chosen, blessed, and broken to be given.   Jesus’ life and death were a life and death for others.   The Beloved Son of God, chosen from all eternity, was broken on the cross so that this one life could multiply and become food for people of all places and all times.

As God’s beloved children we have to believe that our little lives, when lived as God’s chosen and blessed children, are broken to be given to others.   We too have to become bread for the world.   When we live our brokenness under the blessing, our lives will continue to bear fruit from generation to generation.   That is the story of the saints – they died, but they continue to be alive in the hearts of those who live after them – and it can be our story too.

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The Body of Community

When we gather around the table and break the bread together, we are transformed not only individually but also as community.   We, people from different ages and races, with different backgrounds and histories, become one body.   As Paul says:   “As there is one loaf, so we, although there are many of us, are one single body, for we all share in the one loaf” (1 Corinthians 10:17).

Not only as individuals but also as community we become the living Christ, taken, blessed, broken, and given to the world.   As one body, we become a living witness of God’s immense desire to bring all peoples and nations together as the one family of God.