On the second Wednesday of each month, we celebrate the Sacramental Anointing of the Sick (right after the conclusion of the 8:30am Daily Mass). All who are weighed down by immediate illness (physical or mental), chronic illness, the effects of aging, or preparing for or recovering from a procedure or surgery are welcome to join us for this Anointing.
***
A voice from the 19-century on healing: From a recent article in Marginalia – “When Florence Nightingale’s pioneering nursing school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London grew so successful that two new wards were built, the first thing she ordered for the grand opening were plants and flowers, knowing that once ‘all the royalties are gone,’ those lush blooming beauties would be ‘the main pleasure to the patients and nurses.’ Since her earliest days as a working nurse, a century and a half before immunologist Esther Sternberg demonstrated the link between emotional balance and susceptibility to disease, Nightingale witnessed patient after patient receive flowers ‘with rapture’ — a brightening of spirit that very clearly uplifted their total state of being, allaying their physical suffering in measurable ways: ‘I shall never forget the rapture of fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. I remember (in my own case) a nosegay of wild flowers being sent me, and from that moment recovery becoming more rapid…. People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by colour and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.’”
