What have they to do with us, these three women in Mark? And what have we to do with them?

         Is there a part of us that bleeds without end? A wound in us that just won’t heal, or something that is draining the life right out of us? A shameful secret that we are sure if were divulged would mean we, too, would be ostracized? If so, we might find ourselves in league with this unnamed woman with a flow of blood. 

         We make assumptions about this story, simply because she is a woman-- but there are many ways to bleed without dying; to have the life blood drain out of us day in and day out, taking with it not life itself, but all that makes life worth living:  joy, energy, hope and enthusiasm.

         We may be one of those, you see, who spends our lives walking barefoot through a field of shattered dreams and broken promises, each step tearing at our feet, our way bloodied . . . our lives becoming ever more hopeless and empty, 

We may be one whose heart  aches and bleeds with compassion . . . one who is wounded over and over by events in our lives or by those things that wound us all:  war and violence and cruelty of all sorts. .  Grief becomes a way of life and we bleed. . . until we think we can ache no more; but there is no healing, just a numbness as despair sets in and courage flees.

         Or perhaps we can see the pain of our world in this woman . . . our hurting, fragmented  world. . . it, too, bleeds, doesn’t it?  Wound after wound and no time to heal: the devastation of  9-11, the war, Katrina and its aftermath, tsunamis and earthquakes and mudslides and so many people hurting and what can we do? Where do we begin?  How can we respond? There is so much and we are so few? The world is so far from what we long, so far from what we think it could be. Our hearts ache, and we feel overwhelmed. .

         We are told she bled for twelve years. That’s a long time. A very long time.  There are those among us who have wounds that we feel we have carried a long time, sometimes it feels like forever, a sadness that seems without an end. That describes our experience of the world, too, doesn’t it?  

         This woman’s story can become our story . . . we can see ourselves in her place, her predicament.

But only if all our efforts at being heard -- being whole --  have been rebuked or failed or fallen into the dust.  Then, and only then, can we know what power there is when Jesus   “ . . . gives this sister the dignity of her own thoughts and feelings, and then credits her with all her attempts to regain wholeness.” *She reached out in faith. She believed there could be some healing. Believed that things could be different. Better. That’s what she was credited with. That was the first step. It changed her life.

         We, too, can we reach out in faith and find the healing for which we long. We can be freed from despair. 

         Or perhaps we have experienced losing someone we love or a dream that was close to our hearts, and felt the frustration of hopelessness and helplessness to make things different.

         If we have at times felt like a total outsider, out of place and without power and influence to even begin to find the help we need, we may have felt like something in our lives had gone so totally awry that the only words we could find to describe that confusion would be terms like “crazy, or possessed.”

Or, again, we may experience feelings of hopelessness in our day and time as we see brothers and sisters bound by poverty, addictions, anger, violence, and injustice in all it’s twisted, freedom-stealing forms.

         Then perhaps we could see ourselves standing with this sister calling out for an unbinding, speaking on behalf of others, seeing hope in the midst of it all, unwilling to accept things as they are as how they will always be, and then we, too, can hear -as she heard- Jesus’ affirm “her quick-witted tenacity, who commends her argument on the child’s behalf by his response, ‘For this saying, you may go your way, the demon has left your daughter.’”*  Perhaps we could dare to hope . . .to imagine that we have not been abandoned. And we, too, could summon up the courage to approach the Holy One with our need and longing.        

         Like the woman with the ointment, we may doubt our worth, because we have so long been treated as less than others, shamed and blamed and devalued. We may have internalized those messages of worthlessness. . accepting our lot as our ‘just due’. accepting crumbs of patronizing kindness . . until. .  until . . . one day One came into our midst who valued us.

Us!

Someone who knew us better  than we knew ourselves, and accepted us. Found us to be real and worthwhile. Found us to be lovely  . .  and loved us. Loved us so well we began to love ourselves. Helped us to move beyond the myth of scarcity, into  generosity, living out our new understanding that there is enough for all, and all are good enough.

         Then  we could  understand this outpouring of  adoration and ointment. We could understand the extravagance of giving ourselves so wantonly to this Teacher who loved us when we could not yet love ourselves. Who loved us INTO our true selves. Only then could we understand why “her honoring of this One in such a devoted act ‘will be told in memory of her.’” *

         We, too, who have been wounded, rejected, and ostracized, can understand that now, in the midst of our Lenten journey, we are invited to seek out the One who can heal our hurt, cast out our depression, free us to find that we are valued and beloved. We are invited to seek out this one they knew as Jesus, and stand alongside these women whose faith can nurture our faith, whose courage can give us courage, whose boldness can give us hope. We are invited to hear their stories as our own, claim their worth as our own, and pour out our lives in similar adoration to a God who wills good for our lives.

         We bleed, we are bound, we are found, we are freed.  Our lives are woven of the same cloth as these our sisters, and the touch of Christ makes of all of our lives a tapestry of remembering in new and transforming ways.   

*This meditation was inspired by Rosemary Mitchell and Gail Ricciuti in their book, ‘Birthings and Blessings’ and quotations are adapted from Mitchell and Ricciuti.