The Best Medicine
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, there was a 24-year-old mother of two who was suffering from depression. She had been reduced to prolonged periods of just sitting in front of the T.V. To help control her condition, she was provided medication.
Her husband had been physically and emotionally abusive and was in recovery for alcoholism. Her father was someone she had never met, until after a search for him proved successful. He was not, however, able to answer her need for love. She says that the experience only resulted in her having to “say good-bye to all of my childhood dreams of ‘Daddy.’“
Then one day, she went to Mass and something happened. She says: “I had known the Lord since I was a teenager, yet, I had never experienced such love and peace as in this Mass. I wept through the readings, and as the Host was consecrated, I felt all of my pain and frustration lost into my Lord before me. When I received Communion I felt healed and I knew within me that Christ, my Master, had intervened and divinely healed me. That night, I had a choice, to believe in blind faith, that I had truly experienced the Lord, or if it was just a dream. I knew what I received was real indeed.”
The next day, this woman called her psychologist and said she would no longer need any medication.
Not having experienced it ourselves, we may believe this woman did simply have a dream. We may also believe that, our Lord, coming into that Church at the time of consecration, took pity on His crying child and gave her what she needed most, a true Love for her.
This woman is not unlike people in many other stories reported on this site, who also doubted whether an experience was real. But like the others, she could not deny there was something truly different about the episode from the other times in her life. If anything, the doubt shows a balanced and healthy consideration of the event. The continually growing number of them suggests they cannot all be dreams.
This Lent, let us know that Our Lord has such a love for us that, if we only knew it, all our problems would fade. This Lent, let us be grateful, as this woman is, for the Love He has for us.
(Adapted slightly from an account in My Daily Eucharist by Joan Carter McHugh, and an excerpt contained there from Walking in the Light, by Ann Ross Fitch and Fr. Robert DeGrandis, SSJ.)