Fr Sony’s Lenten message: ‘Only God can heal you’
By Catherine Sheehan
If you want healing and hope in your life, you need to return to God, the only one who can provide true inner healing.
This was the central message of a Lenten Mission delivered by Fr Sony Marsilin Kannanaikal CP, over three evenings—28, 29, and 30 March—at Our Lady of Victories Shrine in Lutana. The theme of the Misson was ‘Jesus: Our hope and our healing’.
“If I need healing and hope, I need to go back to God,” Fr Sony said, “Only he can give me the healing, inner healing and inner hope, and nobody else.”
Fr Sony said this was the 227th retreat he had preached during his 19 years as a priest, an impressive record that he attributes to “God’s blessing”.
Known for his warmth and sense of humour, Fr Sony previously served at St Joseph’s in Hobart. Currently, he is Assistant Parish Priest at Endeavour Hills in Melbourne.
His first talk for the Mission was on the topic ‘Hope in healing’, emphasising the need for healing from our own sinfulness in order to reach heaven.
“We can die today with any kind of sickness and we can still go to heaven, no problem. But if we die today and carry sin with us, we may miss heaven.”
Fr Sony’s second talk was on the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady.
“If she can go through those sorrows with hope and healing, we can too, and the only three things that we need for that is silence, prayer and fasting. That’s what the Church asks us to do during the season of Lent.”
His final talk focused on the parable of the Prodigal Son. After losing his inheritance, the Prodigal Son “came to his senses”, Fr Sony said, and realised he needed to return to his father. Likewise, we also need to come to our senses in order to “realise our brokenness, sinfulness”.
“At the end of the day, we have to go back to our Father and say, ‘I am sorry’. That’s the only thing he needs from us.”
According to Fr Sony, the central message of the well-known parable is that we need to imitate the Father.
“The challenge here is to be like the Father. You have to be perfect as the heavenly Father is, which means being like the Father, compassionate, kind, forgiving.
“The only person who can enter heaven is without sin. That’s the criteria. Therefore, our goal in this world is to go back to ourselves, understand our weakness and to go closer to Christ. Become like Christ.”
Agnes Parr from the Cathedral Parish attended Fr Sony’s Mission and said he was an “engaging and inspiring” preacher.
“I found that I gained a renewed sense of the importance of prayer and how praying for others and being sorry for our sins is so vital in obtaining peace and purpose in our lives,” she said.
“The part of Fr Sony’s teaching that stayed with me most was his reflection on Our Lady—how she embraced a life of peace through silence, prayer, and fasting.”