Bent Over Woman

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“And there before him was a woman who for eighteen years had been possessed by a spirit that crippled her; she was bent double and quite unable to stand upright. When Jesus saw her he called her over and said, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability,’ and he laid his hands upon her. And at once she straightened up, and she glorified God” (Luke 13:11-13).

We see another example of the mercy of Our Lord, reaching out to this woman without even being asked. Our Lord sees someone who has been suffering and immediately He reacts.

She wasn't able to stand upright. She couldn't look up to heaven, but now she's able to have a greater supernatural vision and physically able to stand upright.

Then we're told, “The president of the synagogue was indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, and he addressed all those present saying, ‘There are six days when work is to be done. Come and be healed on one of those days and not on the Sabbath’” (Luke 13:14).

There's a contrast, a change in the narrative. On the one hand, you have this wonderful act of kindness and of mercy that Our Lord performs for this woman. He reaches out to her with His heart, and also with His actions.

And you have this cold, calculating, pharisaical approach of the president of the synagogue who is focused on the Law, the interpretation of the Law (cf. Ex. 20:8), but not on the spirit of the Law

Our Lord reacts very quickly. It's the sort of thing that He cannot stand: lack of unity of life, lack of supernatural outlook.

“‘Hypocrites!’ He said, ‘Is there any one of you who does not untie his ox or his donkey from the manger on the Sabbath and take it out for watering? And this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan has held bound these eighteen years—was it not right to untie this bond on the sabbath day?’ When he said this, all his adversaries were covered with confusion, and all the people were overjoyed at all the wonders he worked” (Luke 13:15-17).

This president of the synagogue had a shriveled heart. He couldn't comprehend the majesty of the Divine Mercy that had freed this woman from so much trouble and anguish.

He was focused on the letter of the Law but was unable to grasp that God was well pleased with this miraculous healing. His heart was cold. His mind was closed. He wasn't able to appreciate the true meaning of what had happened.

Our pride blinds us. In some ways, he was also bent over and could not look upwards. The person standing right in front of him was the Messiah, the Christ. But he had no hesitation in rebuking Our Lord and all the people around Him, citing all the rules that were there in place.

We could think of all the ways that we may be bent over. We are all a bit like this woman, not able to look up, bent over by our pride, our laziness, our envy, our jealousy, our vanity, all sorts of complications. We're very much in need of Our Lord coming and being able to straighten us out to get rid of all those complications.

This woman had been enslaved by these things. She couldn't stand upright, and she couldn't look at Christ. She couldn't look up to heaven. She comes a bit like a symbol of people who have their eyes focused on the ground, on this world.

All the passages that talk about Our Lord's mercy are very rich.

Our Lord shows her this refinement and affection. He does the same to many different people who come to Him: “to the holy women, to representatives of the Sanhedrin, like Nicodemus, to tax collectors like Zacchaeus.”

Our Lord is available and open to everybody. He shows His mercy “to healthy people and to sick people, to teachers of the Law and to pagans, to individuals and to crowds.”

We're told in the Gospel that on the one hand, Our Lord often “had nowhere to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20). On the other hand, “he had many good friends, eager to have him stay in their homes when he was [in the vicinity]. They're moved by the compassion that he has for the sick, his sorrow for those who are ignorant or in error, and also his anger at the money changers” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 108).

When we see how Our Lord reacts on these occasions, we can have a greater confidence in Him. We know how to turn to Him in our need.

Lord, help us to lift up our eyes in this material world, where we're surrounded by people who are a bit bent over like us also, not capable of looking up.

Our Lord teaches us also not to pass by misery or pain with indifference. We have to try and have the heart of Christ, of compassion on our neighbor.

St. Augustine, when talking about this lady, says, “This is how the Lord found her after eighteen years: ‘She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself’ (Luke 13:11), a symbol of those who have their hearts set on things of this world” (St. Augustine, Commentary on Psalm 37).

Eventually, those people lose their capacity to look up to heaven. How important it is that we're able to see things with the eyes of faith, have a supernatural vision, to contemplate God and the wonders of creation.

It gives us a whole new vision of the world. It gives us a greater joy, a greater peace, serenity, because we know that something else has worked here. God has His plans; He's working them out.

“The person who is bent over is only able to see the ground at their feet.” Our Lord invites us to “seek the things that are above, not the things here below” (cf. Col. 3:2).

If we're all the time seeking the things here below, we're not aware “of the great price at which we have been redeemed” (Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels). We're told we “have been bought at a great price” (cf. 1 Cor. 6:20).

There was a man in another country who was in charge of buying supplies for the army. Supplies were often in great quantity. He had a supplier from another country who offered him a big bribe, a six-figure sum, straight into his bank account; nobody would know.

But the man refused. The supplier, who had never been refused before, wasn't very happy. It was a huge amount. He said to him, “Every person has their price. I will find your price."

The man, when he was driving home that evening, was thinking to himself: ‘If it's true that every person has their price, I wonder what my price is, because I've just refused such a huge amount of money.’

Every day he had the custom of reading a few words of the Scriptures. When he got home, he opened his New Testament, and the book fell open at the First Letter of St. Peter, chapter 1, verse 18, which said, “You know that you were redeemed from your vain manner of life, not with perishable things, with silver, or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”

He said, ‘Ah, this is my price. I have been redeemed at a great price. What a fool I would be to sell my soul for anything less.’

That supernatural outlook and vision, whereby we look up, helps us to live in accordance with the price for which we have been redeemed so that we don't forget that all the created goods exist to help us to get to heaven.

The worldly soul lives in a very impoverished universe, all the time thinking of getting, of having, of spending.

The devil may have prevented this woman from looking up for eighteen years. The devil doesn't want us to have supernatural outlook. He doesn't want us to use the means that we may need to use to straighten ourselves out.

We all have interior problems of the soul for which we have to try and find a solution.

Blessed Álvaro, in a letter in 1992, says, “For anyone to fall, they cannot remain like that sick woman in the Gospel who was bent over and could not fully straighten herself.” He quotes St. Josemaría saying, “I don't want children who are bent over because they don't want to straighten themselves out.”

Sometimes we need a good Confession to straighten ourselves out. What complicates us is sin. Sin is the greatest evil. That's why we have to have a great hatred for sin—and not just for mortal sin, but for venial sin. A sensitivity of the soul to avoid all evil things. A sensitivity of soul to keep God happy, and make Him happy with the way that we live and the things we do.

He says, “Be humble; admit your mistakes.” It's not easy to admit our mistakes, admit that we were wrong, or to change our opinion.

But it's a very important habit to get into. It’s a part of humility: ‘I was wrong, I said the wrong thing, I did the wrong thing, I reacted in the wrong way.’

Or if there's anything in our mind, or heart, or soul from our past life, things in our life that we may have done wrong, those have to come out in Confession and spiritual direction.

When we get all those bad things out, all the garbage that we may carry inside that has a great complicating effect on our soul, in our life, we get peace and joy. That's how we straighten ourselves out—and we're all in need of being straightened out.

There was a drunk man who was walking home one night out of his mind. He saw a bent nail on the ground. He thought that nail might be useful someday, but he was so unsteady that when he bent down to pick it up, it took him three or four [attempts] to pick up the bent nail. But finally, he got a hold of it.

The following day when he was sobered up, he got a hammer and began to straighten out the nail. It was quite rusty, so he got some sandpaper to take away the rust. As he was working on the nail, he began to see: “I'm a bit like this rusty nail, bent and broken. I need to be straightened out.”

The Holy Spirit spoke to him as he straightened out that nail and said: I need to do the same with my life, with my soul, and with my heart. He made a good Confession and straightened himself out.

“Admit your mistakes,” he says. “Lift your eyes to heaven. Don't consider things only from your point of view. That’s selfish. Have faith, have hope. Find assurance in the love Christ has for you.”

Often in our prayer, close to Our Lord, we have to see the misery of which we are made, the mistakes we have made, how wrong we can be.

We have the assurance that Our Lord will straighten us out and give us those ideas that we need to make things right.

There might be a relationship with somebody else that we have to straighten out: with a sibling, with a parent, with a friend. We may have said something or done something that turned them off a little bit, or there’s something for which we have to apologize. There are many little relationships that we have to straighten out in the course of our lives.

He says, “Have faith, have hope. Find assurance in the love Christ has for you. It brings peace and joy and assurance and victory, to know that if I do something wrong, something stupid, really stupid, I'll talk. I'll tell it rapidly, and ask for help, and everything will be sorted out.”

What a wonderful thing in our life to know that no matter how great the mistakes we may make, how much we may put our foot in it—and how we can all put our foot in it in big ways—there's a solution for everything.

Instead of covering up our mistakes, or hiding the problem, or hoping that nobody will find out, the mature thing is to talk. Sincerity. Go and tell somebody in charge or some relevant person that I made this big mistake, or I did this wrong thing, or I broke that thing, or I pressed the wrong button.

Very often we'll find that maybe, it wasn't such a big thing. We thought it was something huge but, in fact, maybe it's nothing at all.

When we talk about it, that's the key. We get it off our chest. We realize then that maybe, it's no big deal. It restores our peace.

At some stage in our life, there will always be things that we do wrong, that we need to talk about and straighten out. Speak, and then all the problems get solved.

St. Josemaría gave great importance to the virtue of sincerity. It comes from the Latin word sine cera, without wax.

That habit of talking or saying the truth, even though it's difficult to get the truth out, is very virtuous. It brings great graces from God. It can be very meritorious. It can give us great peace because then we'll find we're understood, we're encouraged, we're helped.

In all that process, we grow. We get rid of the wax. That makes us into a person who is transparent and clear. People can see through us because we're like a pane of glass. We're not complicated or difficult or furtive or secretive; therefore, they can understand us. Because of that, because we speak the truth, we can be trusted.

Trust is built on truth. When one person always tells the truth, you can trust them—what they're going to say or what they're going to do. And it can be helpful then.

On that trust, loyalty can be built. Loyalty is a very important virtue in the family, in society, in any organization, in the home. We always have to grow in loyalty: loyalty to others, loyalty to the Church, loyalty to God, loyalty to Christ.

He continues, “I'll tell it all rapidly and ask for help, and everything will be sorted out. I will employ the means they recommend and carry on forward because I have a Christian vocation.”

It's very consoling to know that everything can be solved. There's a solution to everything except death, and death is life.

Unfortunately, some people can spend their entire lives just looking at the earth, looking down. They haven't learned to straighten themselves out and look up, that liberating effect that comes from a good Confession, from telling the truth.

We can become tied down “by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16).

Our desire for pleasure, often called concupiscence, is a disordered desire that can prevent the soul from seeing God. We need to place order there. Our Lord said that only the pure in heart will see God (cf. Matt. 5:8).

St. Josemaría says that lust of the flesh “can also mean softness, laziness bent on the easiest, most pleasurable way of doing things, any apparent shortcut, even at the expense of infidelity to God.

“St. John speaks very strongly about that lust of the eyes, a deep-seated avariciousness that leads us to appreciate only what we can touch.”

I want to have this, I want to have that, I want to buy this, I want to buy that. “Such eyes are glued to earthly things; they are blind to the supernatural.”

Our Lord invites us to be detached from the things here below to be able to look up. And then we can see many beautiful things. A disordered desire for material things keeps us looking down, just with a human vision. Our Lord wants to show us great things.

"Then the eyes of our soul grow dull. Reason proclaims itself sufficient to understand everything, without the aid of God. … In this way does our existence fall prey unconditionally to the third enemy: pride of life. It's not merely a question of passing thoughts of vanity or self-love; it's a state of general conceit. Let's not deceive ourselves, for this is the worst of all evils, the root of every false step” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Points 5-6).

These enemies of our soul that St. John points out will never triumph if we desire to be sincere.

If we place all our hope in Our Lord, if we lift up our eyes to heaven, if we love the truth and speak the truth, and make that truth known, then everything gets sorted out.

Our faith in Our Lord has to be shown in the little details of each day.

There might be certain challenges on certain days that are greater than others. Our Lord might place us in a situation where we have to say a difficult truth. We might have to tell something to our boss or supervisor that costs us our life's blood. But yet that's where we acquire virtue, something very important.

When we look up with the eyes of faith, there are so many eternal truths that we will come to know and understand, possibly things related to our own life, historical events, events in our life that take on a new meaning.

We look up and we see the hand of God was there in that particular thing.

Or God was working when He sent me to that school, or I had that teacher, or that other person that influenced my life in a special way. Or when I had that pain or that difficulty, that had a certain purpose that led me to this or to that.

Things become comprehensible. Our work acquires a whole new transcendental significance. God has led me to do this particular work to be able to offer it to Him.

We don't run away from earthly realities, but the earthly realities are the means for us to go higher.

We can “receive those things from God, respect them, but then use them to give him glory” (Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, Point 37, December 7, 1965). Possibly then we have a whole new attitude in life.

When this woman was straightened out, she must have given great glory to God (Luke 13:13).

She must have been very grateful—grateful for this great gift that she'd been given, and with a great desire to use all the talents that God had given to her, this new ability to give Him glory for the rest of her life.

St. Paul said to the Christians at Philippi, “Brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just…, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious; if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8).

The Christian acquires a certain grandeur of soul when they become accustomed to referring everything to God. “All are yours,” says St. Paul, “and you are Christ's, and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor. 3:22-23).

We could try to take advantage of all the little moments and events of our lives to lift up our eyes with that same gratitude that this lady must have had when she was straightened out.

To give thanks to God for so many things that we possibly have not thanked Him for before, and to ask for His help, to seek pardon for our sins and failings, and to ask Him that we might never forget that we are a child of God 24 hours a day, so that I never get overly wrapped up in my problems. I realize there is a solution for everything. The sooner I talk, the better.

If we delay bringing out that truth, or making those things known, the longer we stay bent over.

Again, St. Josemaría says, “Rush, rush, rush! Hustle and bustle! Feverish activity! The mad urge to dash about amassing material structures.

“On the spiritual level...shams, illusions, flimsy backdrops, cheesecloth scenery, painted cardboard, hustle and bustle! And a lot of people are running.

“It is because they work thinking only of ‘today’; their vision is limited to ‘the present.’ But you must see things with the eyes of eternity, ‘keeping in the present’ what has passed and what has yet to come.

“Calmness. Peace. Intense life within you. Without that wild hurry” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 837).

When we look up, living in the presence of God, leading a supernatural life, we have that vision of eternity. We're not just stuck in the things of today.

We put things in their place, with order. What needs to be done first, or second, or with more urgency? What things can wait till later?

He says, “Calmness. Peace. Intense life within you. Without that wild hurry. Without that mad urge for change. From your own place in life, like a powerful generator of spiritual energy, you will give light and vigor to ever so many without losing your vitality and your own light” (Ibid.).

Great things depend on whether we live the virtues. Our Lord wants us to be examples and instruments for others to learn the virtues, so that they too can learn how to have a deeper calmness in their life and deeper serenity, so that they too can learn how to live by the truth and to speak the truth, and to learn great things from that.

When we see the way that Our Lord dealt with this woman—He reached out to her with mercy, He laid His hands upon her—that can fill us with a new confidence.

“He called her over,” we're told, “and said to her, ‘Woman, you are freed from your disability’” (Luke 13:12).

Our Lord wants to say that to each one of us, no matter what our disabilities may be, so that we walk on the pathways of the earth with our eyes fixed on Him.

“He laid his hands on her, and at once she straightened up and she glorified God” (Luke 13:13). It was a new beginning, a new change, a new hope.

There are many wonderful things that Our Lord wants to give us in the course of our life: many graces, many gifts, many treasures, insights into wonderful things, a whole new outlook on creation.

When this woman was able to straighten herself out, suddenly the whole world looked very different.

We could ask Our Lady that we might have that ability to look up, to straighten ourselves out, so that we can have that same supernatural vision that Our Lord wants us to have.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

BWM