Our Special Needs: Translated from Latin

(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Mass-Blog-for-the-30th-Sunday-of-Ordinary-Time-2024.mp3)

Sin is humanity’s defining disability. Prayer is our special need. But as individuals, we prefer to apply the “Special Needs” label to anyone else—especially if we think they have intellectual deficits. Scripture teaches that we all have our own little peccadillos. That word’s Latin root means “sin,” with “illo” added to diminish it so we won’t feel too bad about our special needs for healing.

The disabilities highlighted in this Sunday’s readings include blindness and lameness, as well as ignorance. But through the prophet Jeremiah, God reassures those who have been separated from Him that He understands their special need to return.

I will gather them from the ends of the world, with the blind and the lame in their midst,  … They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them; … I will lead them to brooks of water, on a level road, so that none shall stumble. (Jer 31:7-9)

Paul reassures us that even the high priests selected from among us to offer sacrifices for our sins have their own little special needs. These peccadillos help them understand others and “deal patiently with the ignorant and erring.”  (Heb 5:1-6)

Finally, Mark’s gospel introduces us to Bartimaeus, a blind man who begs Jesus for vision. (Mk 10:46-52)  In John’s gospel (Jn 9:2), where Jesus cures another blind man, Jesus’ disciples equate his inability to see with our ability to sin. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?,” they ask. Jesus teaches them and us that God uses all of our special needs to help us see better. In the case of Bartimaeus, faith was his key to insight.

Both Jesus and his mother Mary were uniquely qualified to be God’s instruments for treating the rest of humanity’s sin-enabled blindness. Recently, in our own time, Mary worked such a miracle through a “special needs” adult. It helped others around him see the deep meaning of a prayer we often thoughtlessly recite in rote rotation.

Greg, acting as a high priest to his friends, sang them the “Hail Mary.” It was a prayer of thanksgiving for the summer picnic they just shared and for the friendship they’ve all been sharing for decades.  He translated it into its Latin form, as the gorgeous hymn Ave Maria. Through this translation, Greg bathed his friends’ hurts in this prayer’s ancient beauty.

The Latin words of the Hail Mary might have been strange to this group, but they were familiar enough to everyone’s ears that they were able to savor this prayer as if hearing it for the first time. The filter of Latin actually purified their understanding so they could slow their recitation down and realize what they’ve always been asking Mary to do for humanity’s special needs:

Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.
So be it.

This helped Greg’s friends appreciate another underappreciated doctor of special needs who has been both a friend and teacher to them for most of their lives: Joanne Lasky. For 70 years she has been mentoring special needs children and adults through a special ministry of the St. Michael parish of Independence, Ohio.  The classes she and her partners in special education teach have helped her students share with their families the wisdom of God’s word.

That wisdom can sometimes seem like Latin to the outside world. But as Joanne Lasky has taught students like Greg, and as Greg has taught many others via his Latin arias, slowing down to appreciate God’s blessings can help us see and understand how our own special needs for them are met. 

–Tom Andel