O Holy One...

visit and heal our infirmities for your name's sake.

Praying this prayer each morning has helped me to understand the healing power of God. In the charismatic church we did a lot of shenanigans to "get" the Holy Spirit to "come" and "heal". Usually nothing happened, sometimes God in his mercy chose to acknowledge our prideful and ridiculous efforts and heal in spite of us. But whatever we thought was happening, the focus was always on the idea that there was a wound (be it spiritual, physical or pyshcological) in a person, we needed to get God to come to the wound, fix it and then kindly leave.

But as I've meditated on this idea of Christ visiting and healing I realized we had it all wrong. Christ visited the kingdom of darkness specifically for the purpose of healing us enough to lead us to the Kingdom of Light. But his visitation is not a breeze through on His way to WalMart to help some other poor sod find a parking spot. He *visits* our infirmities. He comes in, he settles down for the night, He infuses our infirmities with His power, His mercy, His grace. It is the infusion of Him that heals. And it is a visit only in the sense that this temporal world of iniquity is temporary. We are all visitors here. As visitors, though, we need to deal with the world. We can only do this when infused with Christ within our being.

There are more thoughts I have on this which I'm having trouble getting into words and what I've written I'm sure doesn't do justice to what I'm thinking and, most importantly, beginning to know in my innermost being - that somehow Christ is in me, that He has infused my being with His Being specifically for the purpose of healing this sickness with which I must live for now. This makes much more sense of Christ's suffering and crucifixion - His visitation into our iniquities - His complete infusion of himself into the sickness of humanity - in order to heal and restore at the Resurrection. This can only happen because Christ is the Light. No matter what place he visits, he Is Light and He Brings Light. Am I way off base here?!