“It’s really been a year of healing,” my friend said at today’s first Simbang Gabi Mass. A year ago, her husband suffered a heart attack in the early days of our nine-day novena. Now, the doctors say you would never know it had happened.
One of our celebrants, a longtime friend, focused on the big change in our Church of the past year–the brave decision of Pope Benedict XVI to 
abdicate, and the selection of a new pope, Francis I, a man who as my friend noted is a Jesuit in the clothing of a Dominican who selected the name of a Franciscan. That’s very inclusionary within my faith. Francis hasn’t changed Church doctrine or dogma, but he’s struck a more inclusionary tone overall, especially to those who have left Catholicism. Perhaps this will prove to have been the year when they began to feel signs of healing in their hearts and souls and the ability to forgive or to come and see.
As I read the prayers of the faithful, I looked out over the faithful assembled, and thought of all those for whom this has not been a year of healing but of tumult and suffering and loss. Most in the church have ties to the Philippines, where thousands have died and thousands more have been left homeless by typhoons, most recently Yolanda in November. I thought of those who asked for prayers for family and friends who are sick or who have died, including one distraught woman whose sister-in-law just passed away in the Philippines. And my prayer for them is that when we all gather for the 2014 Simbang Gabi, they will be able to say that with the help of Christ and community, it’s been a year of healing.
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