Rise, put down your baggage, and go; sometimes what needs healing the most are the things we find hard to let go.

MY DOWN-ON-HER-LUCK FRIEND IS BACK, LOOKING as bad as ever. The landslide that has been Margie s life just keeps rolling down toward the abyss. Margie is a Greek tragedy heading for final devastation when the stage is hip-deep in soliloquy and littered with bodies. I keep hoping one of the bodies won't be hers.

You probably know someone like Margie. She's the one who's never been able to pull it together--"it" meaning life. She holds a full house of the usual credentials: painful childhood, ex-husbands, money trouble. Most of the really bad stuff that happened to Margie belongs to the long-ago past. But it might as well have been yesterday. Things end, but they don't always heal. The wounds under the surface influence all her choices, which are not "choices" at all--just defaults determined by an earlier program. You know how contemporary musicians sample phrases from old songs and present the result as something new? Margie's been sampling her past for decades now, so nothing new really happens to her.

When Margie showed up with a fresh crisis, her old coworkers Erin and I got together over dinner to strategize a response. We wound up wondering why we keep getting involved in this deep well of suffering. We each harbor a secret hope that Margie is making progress, that this time she will emerge whole and sound on the other side of sadness. We wait for her to join us at this table, to share the laughter and know the joy of belonging. We believe that she can. But we also know that the choice to grasp the future instead of clinging to the past is hers alone.

THE SCENE ERIN AND I WERE DREAMING UP FOR OUR FRIEND is the same image Jesus presents as the ultimate future: the heavenly feast. At the center of our religious imagination exists a table spread with beautiful food and choice wines. Here the party never ends, and no one is excluded. But you can't be dragged to this table. The invitation goes out to the highways and byways, but you must take a seat yourself.

Why wouldn't everyone jump at the chance? Yet we know a lot of people who have no interest in this gathering, who don't believe in it even though they hold the invitation in their hands. Reasons for their absence are legion. Maybe they've misunderstood the event. Early on they got the idea this was a snooty, self-congratulatory group, the sort of people they've never got on with. Who'd want to spend an evening--much less an eternity--with such folk?

Perhaps some abstain because they honestly think the invitation doesn't include them. They were taught that only perfect people need apply, and God knows they don't qualify. If their name is on the invitation it must be a printing error. Accustomed to rejection, they aren't going to take their chances with this crowd.

But many who are no-shows at the feast see no way to get there from where they are. Like Margie, these folks are paralyzed by their histories. The litany of disappointment has spiraled inward and pinned them inside. They are suspicious of happiness, view hope as a trap, rage against fate yet surrender to it like a lover each time the dark choices roll around.

We've known people like Margie from a distance, picking through trash barrels or going slowly mad in their mansions. We may have been Margie in certain episodes of our lives, unwilling to reveal our wounds for diagnosis, treatment, and healing. I remember a time or two when life hit so hard I just went to bed and stayed there; I didn't eat, answer the phone, or pray to God. But healing only comes when we sit up and nourish ourselves, open the door to others, and speak the prayer, however wrong and imperfect it may seem.

THIS IS WHY I WANT TO SHOUT MY JOY WHEN THE STORY OF the paralyzed man comes around. Because I've been there, I assume others in the Sunday assembly have known such misery. And here's this fellow on the mat again, being lowered through the roof into our midst. He can't move. He can't reach out for the help he needs. Maybe he doesn't believe in help, doesn't have an ounce of hope left in reserve. He just lies there strangely passive to the encounter with Jesus. His personal anguish screams. He is silent.

Jesus, impressed by the faith behind this rescue, says to the paralyzed man, "Your sins are forgiven." The man on the mat probably heard these words as we do at first: with high disappointment. I'm paralyzed, and that's what you offer me, some spiritual frou-frou? The forgiveness of sins doesn't sound like much to people who don't believe in forgiveness, or sin, or God for that matter. They may not even accept what many psychologists have embraced: that forgiveness is necessary for healing, that it dissolves the barricade of injury, anger, bitterness, and despair, all of which may hold us bound. Forgiveness loosens the grip of the past, uncorks the obstacles to wholeness, and liberates us for possibility once more.

The scribes, intent on Jesus, are well aware that forgiveness is powerful stuff, so powerful that it's reserved for God. They are sure that sin defines this man's paralysis: One is the cause and the other the effect. They believe the body is free only when the soul is unbound. So they perceive that Jesus is not playing hospital in healing this man. He is claiming divine authority in setting soul and body free.

Jesus knows what the scribes are thinking. We have to presume he knows what the man on the mat is thinking, too. The scribes want evidence that Jesus has the right to say these things. The immobilized man wants something, too, but we aren't told what it is. To get out of here and forget this whole thing ever happened? A chance to ponder what forgiveness of sin has to do with his condition? Maybe to hear the words Jesus says next?

"Rise, pick up your mat, and go home," is what Jesus says. And the man, God love him, does just that. We stand in the presence of two miracles. One is the power of the divine Word to do what it says. St. Augustine's term for this is efficacious--God's Word takes effect, unlike human words that are sometimes well-meaning but not always fruitful. God's Word has power, but even God's creative Word cannot override human will. Which leads to the second miracle of the paralyzed man. He gets up off the mat.

THE ABILITY TO RISE AND GO HOME IS NOT THE SAME THING as actually doing it. The power of the mat could supersede the power of the word. The authority of Jesus to liberate us does not include force-feeding this freedom to those unwilling to receive it. The effective words of Jesus still hang in the air today. They are proclaimed in our midst, lowered into the assembly with full resonance and power. How many of us will pick up our mats, and how many will lie passive at the invitation?

Freedom is available whenever we are. Abandoned mats could be stacked up outside the church this week along with our personal testimonies to grace. After our dinner my friend wrote to me about her hopes for our plagued pal grounded in her own testimony:

"I know--because that is my story--how sometimes by the grace of God, the grace of change, the grace of finally giving in to change, that after looking at a problem the same way for the millionth time, how easily the whole thing can turn just a bit and you see it completely new. A situation can be transformed so simply and sweetly that you look at this new thing and think: That wasn't there before, the sense of forgiveness, of wholeness. Or think: It is gone, the anger, the fear, the 'whatever' with its hold on me. How suddenly joy and peace can wash through, making it all clean and new. Suddenly the way through a terrifying forest looks as easy to navigate as an open field. You've still got to cross the field, but you can say: That's where I am going and nothing is in my way.

"I don't just believe in the possibility of such miracles, I swear (in the good sense) that my very life is the result of such miracles."

There are times when I am unprepared for such freedom, too fond of my sin or too attached to my injury to let it go. At those times I may ignore the invitation, draw the blinds against all miracles, and let the phone go on ringing. Self-pity or self-justification can bolt us to the past, but the words of Jesus draw us into the holy present and the happy future. There's a place for us all at the table of love. And make no mistake, you and I can get there from here.

ALICE CAMILLE, author of Invitation to Catholicism (ACTA Publications) and co-author of A Faith Interrupted (Loyola Press).