Host: How do you feel spiritual touches?
Rev. McCloskey: I'm praying, hence I have a lot of arthritis so it's almost like my pain is united to the pain of Christ, so that I no longer feel my pain. Sometimes I can drive the dentist crazy, because I can offer the pain of the drilling, for the sake of people in the world, because I know that the pain of the drilling is going to stop when the driller stops. So I really don't need the Novocain. I was having a gingivectomy, where they dig onto the gums and I was offering the pain, and the nurse, the dentist says helper said, “I’m going to pass out if you don't give him something, this cannot be hurting him.”
So the touch of the Lord is something that literally lifts you out of yourself. It gives you a strength that doesn't belong to you. Whenever there is a nudge to raise my hand to volunteer or of the willingness to put up with something that I otherwise couldn't have put up with, and it can be physical in the sense that you can feel yourself push to volunteer to do something, and you can look around, who pushed me, there's somebody there, but it's a push that comes from God's love being expressive through who you are for the sake of others.
All of these gifts are given for the sake of the community and you can tell who is the author of the gift by the good that comes out of what you are doing. It can be scary because I remember an old sister who was—I told that she was going to hear the voices of the Lord and she was sure I put a tape recorder in the chapel and she pulled out all the questions I love to see where I had this tape recorder which she finally realized there was no tape recorder or anything of that sort.
She said, “Okay Lord, you can keep talking to me and I was praying in the chapel once and I was stretched out, comfortable, and I felt the presence of the Lord and I was too embarrassed to straighten up and to become pious and I had to wait until I no longer felt the presence, before I straightened up” and so like He was going. So, now He knows that I am doing it just because He is here, but He was here, He was here.
Touch is really, touch of the heart, but it can be the touch of the pain, that's been taken away, can be the touch of a kind word that someone speaks for you, it can be a smile, it can be anything that's somehow rather enlarges your heart to the reality of God loving.
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