Lately, living with stage 3 cancer, I find it almost impossible to pray the prayers for my healing that loving friends and family have sent me and prayed for me. Perhaps it is because it is my own body, my very being. Thus there is already an irrepressible cry inside of me written into my blueprint that cries out regardless of the prayers I cannot make or the emotional desire I do not feel. There is also the fact that I carry other stories of other people inside me, people for whom I want healing more than for myself – for the five year old niece of my friend Ann with brain cancer, or a six year old receiving the same radiation treatments I just finished. But there is another reason I struggle to pray these healing prayers for myself, which is different than wanting others to be healed more, or than negating the idea that my body can be healed by the Mystery for His glory.



In fact, this difference is the entire premise of Advent, which rises up like a whirlwind inside of me every time I see the many prayers for healing my six beautiful children have taped on the doors throughout our home. What is this premise? It is that for me, my personal healing is not enough. It is not enough! I weep every time I say this – why? I don't know exactly, but having taken baby steps towards the Infinite on my cancer journey, I know that what I long for is for Christ to come again. I want to go, together with faces I know and faces I will only know someday, "out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands!" (Isaiah 55:12). It is a joy I have begun to taste already now, most concretely when I am speaking, praying, or lately, just being held, by friends of the Movement. But the healing of my body is not enough! I want it all – the future glorious state that Christ will usher in for myself and for everyone.

But if this doesn't help me to live my life now and to face my reality and the people around me with an intensity, then this sense of "not enough" is also not enough.

This is what Fr. Isaac Coulter told us in poetic, apocalyptic tones at our Advent Retreat in Atchison, Kansas. Lift up your head, he said, attune your bodies and your minds to Him, because He is coming! How can we live each moment in light of both our last breath and the first renewed breath we will take in our resurrected bodies? How does this attunement change and charge our lives?

For me, this attunement helped me to get up in the darkness this morning and go to the gym despite a myriad of health issues. It helped me to lovingly prepare oatmeal for my little daughter in an exhausted state. It helped me to greet certain people at Mass that I wanted to hide from. And it helped me to live the moments of concrete grief in my day that I am not already with Him.

On Saturday Fr. Isaac read this to us from the collected texts of Giussani on Advent:

The awareness of finality must accompany us as our self-awareness, as awareness of what we are. For self-awareness is the awareness of something definitive, because our “I” is definitive. All the more definitive is the meaning of our “I.”... And the meaning of our “I” is Jesus Christ and His mystery, so this finality regards our adhesion to Him, our adhesion according to the formula that He has decided for our life. There is no other formula, in order to adhere to Him: there is only the formula that He has decided for our life. The awareness of finality is like the most exact symptom of true Christian self-awareness, of the self-awareness that has us perceive life as vocation.


No other formula and no other name by which I can be saved but by the glorious minutiae of my life – the prayers the children have stuck up on the wall, the woman we saw at the bank walking through the drive-through asking for stickers, my health problems and the friend that came over to hold me in a dark hour. Two reverse bookends that bring a strange gladness of heart into each tick of the clock in between – my final end and the first breath of my new beginning. This can become a prayer if I should let it, the most personal healing prayer of all.

Melissa, Atchison, KS