Situating me between the life I have lived and the life I am for, sickness is liminal in an unusually personal and bodily way. And it is just that liminality which calls forth the sacrament of anointing for the illumination of ambiguity and the transition of the articulation it marks and demands...In the rites of affliction, we have neither a sacrament of the living or a sacrament of the dead, but a threshold between them. At this threshold, as in martyrdom, man finds himself at the very heart of the mystery of his being and of his being in Christ. And there he can cry, in agony and exultation, "I am crucified with Christ, and behold, I live; and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the grace of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."
Here, both for the patient and for the community wounded by his separation from it, the outrage of disorder is subsumed to the very ground of their life, the salvation of the cross. Here is the loss of everything in a new mode of possessing salvation. To proclaim this and to celebrate this is the purpose of the rites for the sick. Here as in all the tradition, the purpose of the rite is to reveal the presence of Christ.
Thomas Talley, "Healing: Sacrament or Charism?" Worship, 46 (November 1972): 318-327.
