Drumbeat of Faith

Marching to a different drummer

Mark 5:25-34

            There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” But his disciples said to him, “You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, Who touched me?” And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.  Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”

            Do you march to the beat of a different drummer?  That phrase was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his famous work called “Walden.”  He wrote, “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.  Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”  In the last two weeks, I’ve met two ladies who marched to the beat of a very different drummer.  They could hear the drumbeat of faith, even though they suffered staggering losses.  The first was a lady affectionately called, “Coco,” who lost her mother, her son and his new wife in a car accident.  It was my first double funeral with two caskets in the middle aisle of the church.  Who wouldn’t crumble confronting that catastrophe, yet Coco stayed strong, stepping to the drumbeat of faith.  The second lady was Marina Martinez, whose husband died last week, and she suffers from severe cancer and has two teen-aged children.  Who wouldn’t pound on the Pearly Gates and demand some answers?  And yet Marina smiles like Job behind her surgical mask and says, “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return.  The Lord giveth and the Lord has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  You see, I did not teach these ladies about faith; they have taught me.  They taught me how to keep time with the drumbeat of faith.

            In the gospel we see Jesus, too, "does not keep pace with his companiones... because he hears a different drummer."  First he asks, “Who touched my clothes?”  Even though tons of people were touching him, only one lady touched him with faith.  Jesus noticed she was marching to the beat of the same drummer he always heard.  Second, when Jesus enters the house of the dead girl, he invites people present to hear the drumbeat of faith and see that she’s only asleep.  But they ridicule him.  They were deaf to that divine drummer.   The whole Scriptures is the story of people learning to march to the drumbeat of faith.

            Do you know someone else who walks to this heavenly cadence?  YOU do.  Now, sometimes the drumbeat of faith sounds a lot like your alarm going off at 5:30 a.m.!  But I can’t tell you how inspiring it is for us priests to see nearly 100 people at daily Mass.  My brother also marches to that divine drummer as he goes to Adoration at 4 a.m. every Monday morning.  Catholic families who have 4, 5, 6 or more children march to that drumbeat, "not keeping pace with their companiones."  Our 42 seminarians know what Thoreau mean because they, too, “step to that music which they hear, however measured or far away.”

            Thoreau said, “I went into the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived.”  You don’t need to go into the woods of Walden pond to live, just listen for the drumbeat of faith.

            Praised be Jesus Christ!