Set Apart

            The word “holy” literally means “set apart.”  When the prophet Joel calls a fast and wants to change the whole rhythm of ordinary life for his people, he announces that the Lord’s time “sets apart” for what needs to change and ultimately be healed and transformed. 

            I’ve discovered that an ailment like a chronic TMJ problem naturally sets one apart, interrupting ordinary life and even making unhealth in general (and pain in particular) a strangely unlivable-but-inescapable new norm, a diseased form of “ordinary time.” 

            I was so relieved in September 2012 to receive a diagnosis of my condition and even happier to hear that my problem could be operated on and healed.  Having an appointment for surgery scheduled for January 24, 2013 was deeply good news for me, notwithstanding the disheartening timetables of waiting in pain for it, worrying about the costs of it, wondering what it would practically entail, and embracing a long, multi-phased recovery.

            When I arrived in Florida for the week of pre-operative appointments, I had an overwhelming sense of living in a different order of time than those around me.  I had a surgical mission to undergo, and I longed for it to come, even despite fleeting feelings of fear of the unknown and the knowledge that there was no turning back; my life would be forever changed.

            In the days both before and after surgery, I remember just marveling at the crowds enjoying themselves in the shops and restaurants and shoreline paths of St. Petersburg, so many strangers simply going about their seemingly carefree, ordinary lives in a time and a condition so utterly “set apart” from my own.

            In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of the “inner room” we are to go to---that spiritual place “in secret” where our life in all of its timing and sufferings, actions and passions, can simply be “set apart” by God for God.  What a mystery that our heavenly Father not only sees us but that this divine seeing actually creates new time---the fullness of time.  From this fullness we receive a freedom from the often crushing expectations of the world’s various demands of what passes for, and is so often ignored as, “ordinary time.”

            Lent came months and months earlier for me this year, in a form not of my choosing---but, I do believe, of God’s choosing.  My TMJ problem and surgery has interrupted my whole life, even as it has deepened it and given it new dimensionality.  Although it was not of my choosing, this gift has been and continues to be for my embracing.  The Lenten practices of prayer and fasting and almsgiving can each have aspects of suffering, little or great.  Each medicinally targets a different part of the body---the heart and the stomach and the hands.

            That God interrupts our time to set us apart is a miracle.  That our suffering has a secret place---or, rather, the very Person of the suffering and Risen Christ---to go to is a miracle.  The Lord’s Forty Days are the divinely appointed time for our surgery and recovery by the One Who has undergone our pain from within to make us holy.  Through it all, in the midst of the uncomprehending world going about its business, Lent comes unbidden:  It is truly time for us to be set apart for this miracle.