Touch Me; Make Me Live Again And
Give Me Back To My Mother
by Rev. Robert J. Hermley

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In the Gospel of St. Luke, we are told that one day our Blessed Lord was traveling to a town called Naim with a great number of His followers, and as He came near to the gate of the town, it happened that a young dead man was being carried out for burial.  The dead young man was the only son of his mother and she was a widow.  The woman was in tears and seeing her, Christ felt sorry for her.  He went up to the body, put His hand on the stretcher and said, "Young man, I say to you arise," and the dead man sat up and began to speak.  St. Luke continues, "and Jesus gave him back to his mother."

What joy, what happiness must have filled that mother's heart on having her son returned to her.  No doubt, she was most grateful to Christ for this miracle, for a mother's love is always special toward her children.  Perhaps she became a faithful believer in Christ from that time on.  We are not told, but we are told that Jesus gave him back to his mother, and we can easily imagine the joy she felt.  Mothers are just made that way.

There are many gifts which Jesus gave to mankind while He was with them on the earth.  To the young dead man He gave life, to the blind man sight, to the deaf He restored hearing, to the sick health.  He even went out of His way to help a young married couple avoid embarrassment at their wedding in Cana.  But the best gift of all, He saved for the end.  There on Calvary's top, Christ gave to the world, through St. John, the only thing and most precious thing He had left -  His Mother.  "Son behold thy Mother; Mother behold thy son."

Scripture tells us that St. John took care of Mary from that time on, and in that beautiful directive to St. John, the entire Christian world saw that St. John was a figure of all mankind and that Christ's words were directed to us all, "Behold thy Mother."

The entire Catholic world has since accepted Mary as its mother.  In our prayers she is hailed as, "our life, our sweetness and our hope," and in our litanies she is called, "refuge of sinners" and "gate of heaven."  It is almost as though Christ has said to us, "there are many ways of getting to heaven - My commandments, My grace, the narrow gate - but the surest and most direct way to heaven is through My Mother.  Since she is the gate through which I entered the world, she is also the gate through which you can safely come back to Me.  Your love for her will not detract from Me, because her whole purpose is to lead her children back to Me.  That is why I gave her to you.  At that moment, she became your mother, too.  She will tell you what she told the attendants at Cana - 'Do whatever He tells you,' and that advice, carefully followed, will lead back to My loving and forgiving Sacred Heart.  My mother is your mother, also."

Nothing is more true in the whole world  than the adage, "To Jesus through Mary."  Since Mary, then, is our mother, she has a tender mother's love for all of us.  How she wishes to direct us all to her Beloved Son.  How difficult it must be for Mary to view the earth today and to see all the terrible sufferings that she sees forced upon her children.  Most of these sufferings are due directly to mankind's disobedience to her Beloved son.  Much of the hunger, oppression, lack of peace and justice, deprivation of freedom and liberty, mankind's inhmanity to each other, all are due to the world's refusal to obey God's Ten Commandments. The Communists and Nazis committed terrible atrocities.  In His good time, God destroyed them both, but how can the world be at peace while millions upon millions of infants are murdered through abortion.  If we kept the commandments, abortion would end tomorrow - "Thou shalt not kill."

Suffering is not caused by God, it is caused by people who do not realize that we are brothers, children of God.  Suffering to others is caused by selfishness and by the world's lack of keeping the Ten Commandments.  G. K. Chesterton, the great writer, once said, "Christianity has not failed; we have not tried it."  Suffering is usually foisted upon us by someone who doesn't believe in Christ, or by one who has deafened his ear to Christ's words.  Christ usually takes His time, no doubt hoping such sinners will repent, but one day He caches up.  Hitler and Stalin found this out, and the abortionists will too.  Their consciences will not forget their murders, and even if they do, there's that final appearance before God one day.  Wouldn't it be something if abortionists had to appear before a panel of aborted children to be judged, while Christ sat off to the side?

We are a nation that has forgotten God.  We have fallen victim to modernism and to humanism which teaches that God is dead - or if He lives, He must be removed from society - we must do away with sacrifice; life must be easy, we must do away with trouble, difficulty and poverty - and all of the time they deny the very One who can do all of that, Jesus Christ.  So they run in circles, seeing suffering caused by sin and lack of faith and refusing to acknowledge the God who can put an end to it.  Who was it who uttered the truism.  "What fools we mortals be!"

Humanism has denied God's existence and has replaced man himself as god.  It has decreed that man should have all the pleasure he wants.  Gratification is the end to be sought - do as you please; and when it leads to a miserable, selfish world to live in, people grumble.

Schools teach sex to the very young, and when he inevitable happens it suggests contraceptives as an answer.  If this does not work, abortion will.  When all of these dreaded seeds come to fruition, and AIDS explodes upon the world with catastrophic results, the purveyors of godlessness will wring their hands and lament, "How did this happen?  We taught them everything" - and that is the reason - they taught them everything.  They taught them, not wisely, but too well!

General Douglas MacArthur told us long ago in his farewell speech, "We need a spiritual recrudescence to equal our scientific achievements."  Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author, told us, too, in his Harvard speech that our western materialism is just as bad as Communism.

Where will it all end?  Instead of pessimism let us look to Mary our Mother: she has lost many other children to sin.  She is weeping for so many of her children who have chosen the world to Her son who is the way, the truth and the life.  Mary weeps for the aborted children, or all of her children led by a false philosophy in schools, where sex is in and God is denied entrance.  She has promised at Fatima, "In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph."  she has defeated communism, now let us ask her to tread on the serpent of humanism and modernism and crush its ugly head, too.

Let us hope that as Mary weeps, Christ will remember the tears of another mother who lost a son, and will touch the heart of each of Mary's children who are dead in sin.  then, the world will know the happiness and peace it was meant to have.  Lord, give us faith and life once again by Your touch.  Touch me, let me live again, and give me back to my mother.