"Be not afraid! Have Faith"

Today’s Gospel, Mk 5: 21-43, contains the story of the woman who was hemorrhaging for 12 years, had used up all of her funds and nothing the physicians did helped her.  She was bleeding physically, losing strength and unable to co-create with her God.  We, too, are bleeding, not physically, but spiritually. We may need to ask ourselves by what means do we deplete our deepest self from the nourishment it needs to grow stronger in God and in the ways of Christ.  Are we smothering the flame of our baptism/confirmation, starving our God-self, our True Self, turning the heart of flesh ithat God gives us through grace and redemption  into a heart of stone by such behaviors as cynicism, destructive criticism, by deceitfulness, by narcissism and individualism, by consumerism and materialism, by a lack of discipline, a lack of love—neither receiving love nor giving love—a lack of humility, faith and hope; by holding grudges and refusing to forgive ourselves and others?  What is blocking our “wombs” from being Christ-bearers, from being co-c reators with our God and cooperating with Christ in transforming the world in which we live? As we discover the answer to those questions, Jesus says to us: Be not afraid. Have faith. The wombs that are barren because of the spiritual bleed are curable in Christ Jesus. What we think is dead in us is asleep, as was the centurion’s 12-year-old daughter whom Jesus also cured in today’s Gospel. The spiritual barrenness we experience from time to time can be made fruitful again by our faith in Christ Jesus. And Jesus can also awaken us from  our spiritual "comas, " as "nothing is impossible for God," Mary reminds us in Luke 1: 37.