“In danger, in difficulty or in doubt, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Keep her name on your lips, never let it pass out of your heart.” (Saint Bernard).
After surgery there is some pain.
I mean, when people are cut open and their insides are dealt with and then everything is sewn together like a piece of cloth, there is bound to be pain. Sometimes the pain is very very severe.
Severe pain can cause a person to go into shock or cardiac arrest. In other words people could actually die from the shock caused by severe pain. And this is why when people are admitted to hospital, people around them work very hard to make sure that they are able to remain comfortable enough after their surgery so that nothing serious goes wrong due to the pain they are in. After all, there are all sorts of other things that can go wrong after surgery, so you would not want pain to be a cause of the issue…
When my father had some serious surgery done on his knees, he woke up from the surgery in considerable pain. Although he was just lying in a bed, the pain in his knee was very severe and he complained of the pain. As a result of his comments about the pain, the nurses looking after him provided him with very strong pain relief medication and after he took that he was able to experience a period of time with far less pain.
And this is important because when he experienced less pain (although the underlying injury remained the same) he was able to get up out of bed and participate in the required physiotherapy to get his knee moving and get on with his recovery.
And I have been thinking about that today because it reminds me of our time here on Earth.
We are on the earth separated from God – in a way. After all, although He reminds in our Soul as God the Holy Spirit, and among us through the Sacraments, He is separated from us in the way that He never intended to be. Instead, when God made the world, He would have stayed among us as He stayed with Adam and Eve, visiting us in the perfect Garden of Eden…
And this unnatural separation from God is like the pain that my father felt after his operation. But God’s presence among us through the Sacraments and the Living Holy Spirit is like the pain relief. The pain relief does not heal the wound, but it does make it possible for the person in recovery to get up out of bed and complete the physiotherapy exercises – or in spiritual terms – to live our lives in a manner that sets us on the narrow path to Heaven…
And this is different from Hell, where there is no Holy Spirit (for Hell is Evil and an absence of God). And that means that Hell is like receiving no pain relief following a surgery… Because in Hell everything is already decided and there is no physiotherapy – because nothing will ever get better again.
And if I did not love God, I think that in itself would be a suitable reason for me to simply decide that I would embrace God in my life… After all, it is through God that I am able to achieve all things…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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