Three pillars anchor our ministry at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center: hope, peace, and healing. During this Advent season, as we prepare to celebrate Jesus Christ as God’s Word made flesh, I choose to write about healing.

During these weeks of Advent, Christians prepare to celebrate the glorious incarnation of God Himself. He is Emmanuel, “God with us.” Once again, we stand breathless at the wonder of it all: God so loves us that He has become one of us, born of a woman as we are born of a woman. He has taken upon himself all aspects of our humanity—except that alienation from God, which we know and experience as sin. Yet, even then, God has chosen not to chastise and condemn, but to meet us in our brokenness. Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Mary, comes to heal.

Pardon the pun, but every one of us knows the sense of “sickness” with which the current COVID-19 pandemic has enveloped us. Families are separated, jobs have been lost, social relationships are fragmented, even our time of worship has been broken. Isolation, depression, and despair touch us in ways small and large. Our hearts cry out for healing: “When will life be restored?”

Healing is a paramount pillar of ministry these days at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center, now serving as a COVID-19 isolation center. Since September, individuals and families impacted by the coronavirus have been healed emotionally, physically, and spiritually within our facility. Christ’s healing has been exercised through the work of capable caregivers, counselors, and staff as they have provided loving care for those seeking wholeness of body, mind, and spirit.

However, we need not be quarantined at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center to know the healing power of God in our lives. As disciples of the one who has first healed us, we are called to reach out to be agents of healing to those around us, family and strangers alike. In our acts of kindness, generosity, and care, we bring wholeness to the brokenness found in our world. Where there is brokenness in any form, in the name of Christ, we have opportunity to bring in-the-flesh healing and life, especially this Advent, as we prepare to celebrate Christmas with a sense of hope and promise.

God bless you and your families as we prepare for the great Christmas feast!

Deacon John Ruscheinsky, Director of Immaculate Heart Retreat Center