Gratefully Embracing Grace and Choosing a New Story

Today’s reflection is by Terry Gonda (she/her), a lifelong Catholic and spiritual director. She and her wife, Kirsti Reeve, are music ministers at their Jesuit parish in Detroit. She previously served for 36 years as music director at a campus ministry parish before being fired by the Archdiocese for legally marrying Kirsti. Rooted in Ignatian spirituality and the wisdom of the mystics, she now co-leads a lay Catholic community—formed from the remnants of her former parish—grounded in synodality, radical welcome, and spiritual accompaniment. Her story is featured in Cornerstones: Sacred Stories of LGBTQ+ Employees in Catholic Institutions.

Today’s liturgical readings for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time are available here.

My path as a Catholic lesbian has gifted me a persistent—maybe even obnoxious—focus on flipping paradigms. Instead of telling victim-reactionary stories, I try to focus on grace-rooted stories that calm anxiety, restore agency, and free us to live more fully as Christ’s Presence in the world.

But I’m learning that this story-shift rarely happens all at once. It usually begins with a pause—stopping inside the victim story, naming what’s there, and inviting grace to begin the transformation. Gratitude, I’ve found, is the catalyst that makes that possible. Today’s liturgical readings remind us that when we choose gratitude, we create space to partner with God in transforming our stories of hurt into stories of healing.

Leprosy features prominently in today’s first reading and gospel passage.  In the ancient world, leprosy was a death sentence—exile from family, community, and worship. Healing didn’t just mean restored skin but restored life. In the first reading, after the foreign general Naaman is cleansed of his leprosy, he finds he cannot return home to his old ways. Transformed by gratitude, he asks for two mule-loads of Israel’s soil so his new life will be rooted in new ground. Not a souvenir but a declaration: my story is different now and I want a relationship with the God who healed me. 

The Samaritan leper in the gospel shows the same arc. Gratitude completes his healing, turning restoration into communion. Gratitude is how grace takes root in us—it keeps the healing from becoming just a memory and turns it into a way of life..

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But what about when it feels like the healing hasn’t come quite yet? LGBTQ+ Catholics know this leper’s exile. Coming out, or being outed, can mean banishment from family, church, or community. The message: your life is untouchable. That pain can be unbearable. Yet I’m learning that while we can’t always change what is thrust upon us—orientation, illness, loss, identity–we can change the story we tell about it. 

The despair story says, “I am unworthy, I am excluded,” breeding self-loathing and destructive actions. But the discipleship story says, “Even here, God is present. Even now, I am God’s Beloved and can live as Christ’s Presence, trusting something grace-filled will emerge when I do.” That flip does not erase pain, but it transforms it into fuel for growth, courage, and agency towards healing action.

One of my mentors, Fr. Jim Sheil, a retired Army chaplain in his eighties, is living this second approach. After several heart attacks, he was led to embrace the Welcoming Prayer: “Abba, I welcome everything coming into my life today because it is of you.” He has shown that over time, this prayer bulldozes a new path—clearing fear, resentment, and despair until what remains is closer union with God, and a reflex of gratitude and a deep peace – even inside messy reality. He’s found gratitude without the grand healing, and he reminds me: just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s bad: it’s simply hard.

This isn’t just theory for me. My own messy, imperfect practice has taught me that whether through the pain of my first marriage ending or being fired from my 36-year music ministry for being in a same-sex marriage, what first looked like death became another leprosy-healing story waiting to unfold.

The invitation to attempt our own paradigm shift—to embrace grace and choose a new story—now stands before everyone in the Church. The 2024 Synod stirred both hope and frustration, and each of us must decide which lens we’ll lean into.

Naaman’s soil and Fr Jim Sheil’s prayer point in the same direction. Healing and renewal cannot mean clinging to old patterns. They require new roots, a new story.

Communities are restored when we welcome and are welcomed,
forgive and are forgiven,and practice gratitude even before the grace is visible.

Like Fr. Jim, we don’t  need perfection, just persistence.We merely bring our messy, beloved selves, take the next right step, and trust God with the rest – not in spite of it being hard, but maybe because of it.

Perhaps the greatest miracle is not simply skin made clean, but outcasts—and outcasters—allowing their stories to be rewritten with the pen of grace, new soil embraced, and estrangement transformed into belonging.

Blessed are those who give thanks even as their story is being rewritten.

—Terry Gonda, October 12, 2025