The Cure of the Possessed Boy
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.
“As they were rejoining the disciples, they saw a large crowd around them, and some scribes arguing with them. At once when they saw him, the whole crowd were struck with amazement and ran to greet him.
“And he asked them, ‘What are you arguing about with them?’ A man answered him from the crowd, ‘Master, I have brought my son to you. There is a spirit of dumbness in him. And when it takes hold of him, it throws him to the ground, and he foams at the mouth and grinds his teeth and goes rigid. So I asked your disciples to drive it out, and they were unable to.’
“In reply, he said, ‘O faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me’” (Mark 9:14-19).
Our Lord came to this place where His disciples were awaiting Him. Then you had the father with this sick boy, a group of scribes, and quite a crowd of people. Seeing Our Lord, they were filled with joy. They came out to meet Him. “They were all amazed, ran up to him, greeted him” (Mark 9:15)—a little bit like we should try to greet Our Lord in the tabernacle. Somehow everybody felt Our Lord's presence.
Then, the father of the boy steps out from the crowd that surrounded Our Lord and says, “‘Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit. … I asked your disciples to cast it out and they were not able.’”
The disciples had already performed some miracles in the name of Our Lord. They had tried to cure the boy, but they had not been successful.
Jesus later explained to them privately what had been lacking in order to carry out the miracle. The father of the boy had insufficient faith.
He possessed some faith, as can be seen in the way that he was searching for a cure, but still he did not have complete faith, that boundless trust for which Our Lord had asked and continues to ask. The Lord, as He always does, moves the man to step forward.
“They brought the boy to him…and at once the spirit of dumbness threw the boy into convulsions and he fell to the ground and lay writhing there, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked the father, ‘How long has this been happening to him?’
“‘From childhood,’ he said, ‘and it has often thrown him into the fire and into water in order to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us’” (Mark 9:20-22).
Initially, this man comes to Our Lord with humility, but vacillating a little bit, unsure of his ground. “‘If you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.’”
“And Jesus says, ‘If you can?! Everything is possible for one who has faith.’ At once the father of the boy cried out, ‘I have faith, help my lack of faith.’ And when Jesus saw that a crowd was gathering, he rebuked the unclean spirit” (Mark 9:23-25).
Our Lord knows what's troubling the man. He challenges him: if you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.
This is a great act of faith for us to try to pray many times: ‘Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief. Grant firmness to my faith. Teach me to back up my faith with deeds, to weep for my sins, and to trust in your power and mercy.’
Faith is a gift of God, and only He can increase it in the soul.
Every time we go to Mass, at the moment of the Consecration, it's a good moment to say the aspiration, ‘Increase my faith, increase my hope, increase my charity.’ And also in other moments of the day when, maybe, our faith feels a bit challenged, to cry out to Our Lord like the father of this boy, ‘I believe, but help my unbelief.’
Our Lord will increase that supernatural grace and gift in our soul. He's the one who opens the heart of the believer so that it can receive supernatural light. That's why we should be praying for it.
But at the same time, certain interior dispositions are necessary—dispositions of humility, of purity, of openness, of love which opens the way to a greater and greater security.
“Jesus says, ‘Dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.’ And it threw the boy into violent convulsions and came out shouting, and the boy lay there, sort of like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and held him up and he was able to stand. And when he had gone indoors, his disciples asked him when they were by themselves, ‘Why were we unable to drive it out?’ He answered, ‘This is the kind that can only be driven out by prayer’” (Mark 9:25-29).
If at some time our faith were to falter a little bit in the face of difficulties in our apostolate, or if the faith of our friends or siblings or children was to waver or weaken, we can imitate the good father in this Gospel passage.
In the first place, he asked for more faith because this virtue is a gift. ‘I believe, but help my unbelief. I want to believe more. Give me that grace. Give me that gift.’
At the same time, it depends on us. “To open our heart,” St. John Chrysostom comments, “is a work proper to God, but to be attentive is a work proper to man: the act in this case is a work both of God's doing and of man's” (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles).
We can strive to imitate this poor father in his humility. He doesn't have any merits of his own to present, and for that reason, he has recourse to Our Lord's mercy: ‘Have pity on us and help us.’
This is the sure method that every prayer of ours should follow—to have recourse in this way to God's mercy and compassion. For our part, humility, purity of soul, openness of heart towards the truth will enable us to receive those gifts, which Our Lord never denies to souls and place no obstacles in the way of His granting them.
Every time that we approach the sacraments—Confession, or Holy Communion, or the other sacraments—we get an increase of the supernatural virtues of faith, of hope, and of charity. And if we really want to grow in those virtues, to receive the sacraments with greater frequency is the way to go.
If the seed of grace has not taken root in our soul, it is simply because that seed has not found fertile ground.
‘Lord, increase my faith!’ we can ask in the intimacy of our prayer. ‘Don't allow my faith in you ever to be shaken.’
What did those people who met Our Lord in the towns and villages see in Him? They saw what their internal dispositions allowed them to see.
We see aspects of this in all the different reactions in the Gospel. Would that they could have seen Jesus through the eyes of His Mother! What greatness would then have confronted them. And what pettiness and narrow-mindedness they would have observed in many of the Pharisees, or caught up in the intricacies and nuances of the law.
They were not even able to discover in the miracles Our Lord worked that the Messiah had come at last. A great number of them remained blind before the light of the Gospel.
Their knowledge of Scripture didn't help them to see in Jesus the fulfilment of all that had been foretold about the Messiah and His promised arrival. Many of His contemporaries refused to believe in Jesus because they didn't have an upright heart, because their works were not motivated by the desire to please God, because they didn't love God, and they didn't have a right intention in what they did.
We can ask Our Lord to help us to love him in a very true way, and to show that love with concrete deeds, so that He may be happy with the things we do and we may win His graces in showing Him that we're serious about our requests.
We're told in St. John, “Jesus said, ‘My teaching is not mine, but of him who sent me. If any man's will is to do his will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God or whether I'm speaking on my own authority’” (John 7:16-17).
They didn't have the necessary dispositions as St. John; they weren’t seeking God's glory. They were seeking their own glory (cf. John 5:41-44).
A reminder to us to be watchful for our vanity and pride. They are deep down all the time.
Not even the miracles that Our Lord performed could supply for their lack of the necessary internal dispositions. The real reason for the rejection of the Messiah, so long expected and so clearly heralded and announced, is to be found in the fact that not only do they not possess God in their hearts as their Father, but worse, they had for their father the devil, because neither their works, nor their feelings, nor their intentions were good (cf. John 8:42-44).
Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Humani generis, conveys the idea that, “God lets himself be seen by those who are able to see him because they have the eyes of their soul open. Everyone has eyes, but the eyes of some are blinded as if they were in darkness and they cannot see the light of the sun.
“But the light of the sun does not cease to shine simply because these sightless ones fail to see it; rather is this darkness due to their inability to see” (cf. Pius XII, Encyclical, Humani generis, August 12, 1950).
This can be a stimulus to us to take very good care of the frequent Confession of our faults, negligence, and sins, if this sacrament can cleanse us and dispose us to see the Lord more clearly here on this earth.
In our apostolate, we can be aware that often a great hindrance to many souls accepting the faith, recognizing their vocation, or leading a Christian life, is provided by personal sins unrepented of, or disordered affections, or a lack of correspondence to divine grace.
Theophilus of Antioch says, “Man, influenced by his prejudices or stirred up by his passions or bad will, is not only able to deny the evidence of external signs plain to be seen before his very eyes, but can also resist and reject the higher inspirations God infuses into the soul” (Theophilus, Book I, 2, 7).
If one is without the desire to believe and to do the will of God in everything, whatever the cost, one will simply not accept even what is glaringly evident.
There's an awful lot of people today who don't want to accept what is glaringly evident about the scientific truth of the beginning of human life. The person who lives shut up in their own egoism and doesn't seek the good but only their own comfort or pleasure—they'll have a difficult time believing or understanding a noble ideal.
And in the case of the person who has already taken the step of giving themselves to God, they will find within themselves a growing resistance to the specific demands of their vocation. We're all subject to these difficulties or challenges or temptations.
A sincere and contrite confession, well-prepared, can then be seen as the great means to rediscovery of the way of faith. It gives one the interior clarity necessary to see what God is asking of us.
When a person purifies and cleanses their heart, they prepare the ground so that the seed of faith and generosity can take root in their soul and grow and bear fruit. We do a great good to souls when we help them approach the sacrament of Penance.
It's a common experience that many of the problems and doubts which afflict souls are cleared up with a good Confession. A soul can then see with great clarity its own restored cleanliness, and much better now are its dispositions of the will.
We could ask Our Lord that we might pray with more faith and have a greater faith in all the means He's given to us.
We can see that the failure of the apostles to cure the possessed boy weighed heavily on their hearts, so much so that they came to ask our Lord why could we not cast it out.
And the reply that Our Lord gave them can be very useful for our apostolate: “This kind of demon cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).
It's only with prayer that we'll overcome the stubborn obstacles that [balk] our progress and manage to overcome temptations ourselves and help many of our friends to find Christ. Just to start with us going deeper, if you want to be more, to St Josemaria be better.
Venerable Bede explains that in teaching the apostles how to expel this particularly wicked demon, Our Lord shows us all how we should live and how prayer is the sure way to overcome even the greatest of temptations.
“But prayer,” he says, “does not consist of only the words with which we invoke God's mercy; it's also what we offer to God in sincere worship, moved by faith” (cf. St. Bede, Commentary on St. Mark’s Gospel).
All our work and every deed should be a pledge to the Lord and be therefore full of fruit. We should reinforce our prayer with deeds of virtue, with work that is well done, with the effort to improve ourselves, in that very point in which we want our friend to improve. This attitude towards God also opens the way for an increased access of faith in the soul.
Blessed Álvaro del Portillo says, “It is only in prayer, in the intimacy of a face-to-face and personal dialogue with God which opens up the mind and heart (cf. Acts 16:14), that the man of faith can deepen his understanding of God's will with respect to his own life” (Álvaro del Portillo, On Priesthood), and to everything related to it.
We can ask Our Lord frequently to increase our faith. We can ask for it in our apostolate when the fruits seem to be a long time in coming. We can ask for more faith with respect to ourselves and our own personal defects, and the defects of those around us, when perhaps it begins to look as if those defects are insuperable.
We can ask Our Lord when we see ourselves as miserably inadequate for doing all that God wants of us. All these are reasons to cry out, ‘Lord, increase my faith!’
The apostles prayed in this way, but in spite of having seen and heard Christ Himself, they felt their confidence shaken.
Jesus never refuses His help. Throughout the day that lies ahead and every succeeding day, we can feel the need to say to Our Lord, ‘Lord, don't leave me alone to rely on my own personal strength, because left to myself I can't do anything!’
The prayer that the good father makes can inspire us to go to Our Lord with our plea for a greater faith. We can say, “In this moment of our prayer and our meditation, we can say the same words to Our Lord, ‘Lord, I do believe, I want to increase my faith. I have decided to follow you closely. Repeatedly during my life I have implored your mercy. And repeatedly too I have thought it impossible that you could perform such marvels in the hearts of your children. Lord, I do believe, but help me to believe more and [better]’” (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 204).
If we address this same plea through Our Lady, Mother of God and Our Mother, and Teacher of faith, surely she will bring us to believe even more. “Blessed is she,” St. Josemaría said, “[for thy believing; the message that was brought to thee from the Lord shall have fulfillment]’ (Luke 1:45)” (ibid.).
In a way, you could sympathize with young men and women who abandon their faith when they get to university. Telescopes can now routinely take photos of galaxies. The galaxies are enormous monsters, each one with billions of stars like our own Milky Way.
Each of those stars shines as brightly as our sun, many with planets and moons like the planets and moons in our own solar system. The light from one of those galaxies takes millions, in some cases billions of years, to end up in the camera that captures the photograph.
Are we really supposed to believe that a carpenter from Nazareth who was crucified by the Romans 2,000 years ago created all that? The Bible states that Jesus, with His Heavenly Father, created all things, and created all out of nothing.
St. John's Gospel opens with the proclamation, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came into being. Not one thing came into being except through him” (John 1:1-3).
The Biblical message demands a difficult act of faith. It's a radical message that each one of us has to confront. That man, Jesus of Nazareth, declared that He is the Son of God, and then claimed that only He has the power to make us happy.
This outrageous claim also appears in John's Gospel: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
St. Matthew also tells us that St. Joseph was the husband of Our Lady and that he was a holy man. “Before they came to live together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18-25).
An angel had appeared to Mary (Luke 1:26-38). She knew the secret of God sending His Son into the world, making her pregnant by the power of the Holy Spirit.
But Joseph was left in the dark. He didn't know what to do. Anyone who takes faith seriously will be tested, and that test is different for each person. It may be a time of distress when you feel as if you cannot move either right or left, backwards or forwards. It may be a case of financial ruin, a death in the family, or some other disaster.
Joseph eventually received the word he needed in order to know what God wanted him to do. As happened with him, God will also show each one of us the way forward.
As one of the saints observed, a Christian can experience darkness. This darkness can last for days, for months, or even years. When this happens, cry out using the words of the prophet in the book of Psalms: “Take pity on me, O Lord. I call upon your name all day long. Give your servant reason to rejoice. For to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul” (Ps. 86:3-4).
We can try to seek union with Christ. No matter how far away He might seem to be, when you feel as if He no longer listens to you, even in the darkest night, He will show you the path He wants you to take using the gentle light of His mercy.
Any time we spend trying to grow in faith is time well spent: to deepen our faith, to admire its beauty, to put it into practice, try and spread it in every way that we can.
Try to put Christ at the summit of our lives, to discover Him, meditate on His mystery, to increase our devotion to the Blessed Eucharist, to the Holy Spirit, to Our Lady. They will all foster that increase of faith in our soul.
Also, if we try to know our faith a little better, studying the Catechism, exposing ourselves to doctrinal formation, and profess our faith following the example of Abraham, of the apostles, of the first Christians, and trying to communicate that faith to many other people, sometimes with our words, sometimes with our own personal example, often a silent example.
Often that's the role that parents are called to play in the family, particularly as children grow older. We're called to reflect that faith in the very ordinary professional and social environments in which we have been placed, helping other people around us also, the work of the apostolate. And if we read the Gospels a little bit every day, that will also stir our faith.
We'll get graces for a new conversion, particularly in and through the sacrament of Confession. We learn how to be united to Christ on the Cross with faith. We grow in our life of prayer and mortification.
And Our Lady, who is the woman of faith that's put into practice, will help us to achieve all of these goals.
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.
MVF