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The Sixth Mass Reflection Video

Leprosy is without doubt a terrible disease to have, but not as terrible as feeling unloved, unwanted, or abandoned. One of the worst things that can happen to a human being is to be rejected. Rejection hurts beyond any other state or emotion. It makes a person feel worthless.

It makes one want to shrivel up or openly rebel. Rejection is devastating for children, the elderly, the handicapped … To a child, abandonment by its parents is equivalent to death. The elderly fear rejection more than all their infirmities together. The deepest wounds of the handicapped are caused, not by their physical or mental limitations, but by the rejection they have known.

Reflection: Restoring wholeness

Each of us to some extent has The Sixth Mass Reflection the pain of rejection. There are ways of insulating oneself from rejection — risking little, wanting needing nothing, avoiding relationships. It seems better to build walls and avoid Refflection than to risk suffering rejection. But this is like cutting off our feet so as not to need shoes. The man who approached Jesus was a reject. As a leper he was forced to live outside the community. At that time illness was seen as a punishment for sin. Hence, the leper was considered to have been rejected by God too. We can reject a person in small but subtle ways — by the tone of our voice or even by a look.

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But pinpricks of rejection can accumulate with serious long-term effects. The interesting thing is not that Christ cured the leper, but the manner in which he cured him. Excluded and rejected by everybody, The Sixth Mass Reflection were forced to ring a bell to warn people of their approach; nobody would come near them for fear of contamination and of being branded Reflction. But Jesus cut through all of this. He was moved with compassion on seeing the plight of the leper. He allowed the leper to approach him. Then he did the unthinkable. He reached out and touched him.

In this way he gave him a sign of welcome, and repaired his sense of being dirty and unworthy, of being nothing but human scrap. Before healing his broken body, he healed his broken self-image.]