Maureen and Priesthood

FR. TERRY RYAN, CSP
Luke 17: 11-19
October 14, 2007

When I was a little boy, my big sister Maureen knew that I wanted to be a priest. One day I fell down and cut myself over my eyebrow. Maureen began to patch me up. She said, very nonchalantly, “Oh, too bad Terry that now you cannot be a priest” “What,” I said. “Why not?” Maureen answered, “Because you cannot be a priest if you have scars on your body. Plus you cannot get married either, because girls don't like boys with scars.”

“What am I to do?” I whined. “Oh, you can be a clown in a circus. You already have a funny face,” she answered.

The next day, I went to school and told Sister Steven that Maureen said I could not be a priest because I would have a scar from my wound. Sister said something very memorable to me. “Terry, it is not the scars on the outside that prevent us from doing things. It is the scars on the inside, on the heart, that hold us back.”

I think that her statement to me pertains to the lepers in the Gospel. They had a common bond with scars on the outside skin. But when Jesus told them to go and show themselves to the priest, one of them had to deal with a scar on the heart. It was the scar of religious prejudice and differences. One leper was a Samaritan. To which priest was he to go? The other nine were Jews and went to the Jerusalem temple. But a Samaritan believed that God's special place was in Samaria , and so the Samaritan would normally go to the Samaritan shrine to see a Samaritan priest. Meanwhile, all were cured.

Suddenly, the light goes on for the Samaritan. God is not in only one special place. Maybe God is in a person, a special person. Faith is beginning for the Samaritan. He returns to Jesus, praising God as he comes to Jesus and falls on the ground in front of Jesus in Thanksgiving. His faith is taking hold, and he begins to let go of differences that divide Jew from Samaritan in all its nasty ways. His heart is being cured of its scar of prejudice.

What about us and how we divide ourselves one from another? Do children at play have “their” group, from which others are excluded because they are deemed too different, or too unworthy? It is one thing to keep our distance from someone who is dangerous or downright nasty, but often we separate ourselves because of personal prejudice or style. This causes us to be wounded on our own hearts and to wound others. I could not be a priest if I was hanging out only with certain types of people, or avoiding certain types of persons. I would not even be a follower of Christ, much less a Christian. Maureen was right about wounds. She just had the inside mixed up with the outside wounds.