Leprosy of Our Times

Commentary to Luke 17:11

We live in a time when many, if not most, of the diseases known to be incurable in ancient times no longer pose a significant threat.

So it is with leprosy - once seen as a visible sign of God's punishment of sinners, a visible sign of impurity. Lepers were treated as outcasts, locked up in colonies, living on the margins of society - destined to die in loneliness and isolation.

Today, we treat leprosy with antibiotics, and the word leper no longer carries the moral weight it once did. And yet today, perhaps more than at any other time in history, we as a society exhibit certain symptoms traditionally associated with leprosy - namely, lack of sensation and numbness of the senses, of our feeling-life.

Leprosy is a bacterial infection that eventually leads to the death of nerve endings in the skin. Lepers are no longer able to feel, to connect with their environment, and eventually end up without any ability to sense, to feel the world around them - or even to feel themselves. Like lepers, we as a civilization are gradually losing our sense of touch, our ability to connect with the world and with each other. Even with ourselves.

This is modern leprosy, with its characteristic gesture of individual and social isolation - something that, in the long run, cannot be treated with antibiotics or any other chemical compound or substance.

"The power of your faith has healed you," says Christ to one who has been healed, revealing both the ultimate cause and the cure of illness.

Faith - probably the most underestimated, derided and rejected of the qualities of our human consciousness in our time - is the medicine prescribed by Christ Himself. It cures the leprosy in the story in the Gospel of Luke, but it also cures the leprosy of our time - our inherent disconnection and lack of empathy.

But what is faith? Where does faith begin? How do we live it?

It is our ability to listen and to see and to feel  beyond the audible, beyond the visible, and beyond the tangible. Faith - is our ability to sense that there is more to us than what we already know, what has already been determined, what has already been "diagnosed".

Our ability to connect with that which is not yet realized - and which, without our good will, without our effort, will forever remain unrealized, invisible, and hidden.

It is our ability to open - and to meet each other as we are seen and met by the One who heals our human condition with love - not judgment.

Faith is our will - to be whole.

Once again.

Rev. Rafal Nowak