My Journey

With schools closed through the end of the year, I continue to focus my HOPE ministry work on helping those struggling to earn money to eat during the pandemic. Thanks to the generosity of the many people who have donated to my food relief efforts, I have been able to provide food to HOPE families who are unable to put food on the table to feed their families. Without our support, these families are forced to go without meals. With few jobs available in the current environment, many people are without a means to support their families, which is why I’m always asking for help.

As those who have donated know, I have the students make videos to express how the food assistance has helped their families. Not only have the videos been a great vehicle for allowing the students to connect with those who are assisting them, but the process of making the videos has also been a great blessing. The videos have really helped the students to improve their confidence and self-image.  They have also helped the students learn how better express themselves.

I typically get together once a week with a few of the secondary school students to make videos, which is one of the most fun and rewarding things that I do in my ministry work. We laugh together when they mess up and feel a sense of pride when they create something special. After making the videos, we have lunch together and then watch a movie. This week we watched the movie Hotel Rwanda. I gave them a list of movies to choose from and they selected Hotel Rwanda, primarily because the movie is set in Africa. Rwanda and Kenya are less than 500 miles apart. I saw the movie when it first came out. It is very powerful telling of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, where some 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days in 1994. I think the movie was perhaps a little slow going for them at the beginning. However, they eventually got into the drama enfolding on the screen and by the end, they were fully engrossed in the movie. They had heard about the Rwandan genocide in school, but really didn’t know that much about it before the movie.

Tribalism is unfortunately also a reality in Kenya and is responsible for much corruption and violence here. Tribalism not only plays a detrimental role in Kenyan politics, but it has taken an immeasurable toll on the development and economic progress of the country. The entire Kenyan population pays the price. Tragically, besides that fact that the movie takes place in Africa, this is another aspect of the movie that the students could unfortunately also relate to.

As I’m watching the movie, I’m thinking how I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I’d someday be in Africa with a bunch of high school students watching a movie about a genocide that happened during my lifetime and not much before they were born in a place not too far away from where we were watching the move. Life takes amazing twists and turns.

We’ll mix in some less serious movies in future weeks, but probably not the typical explosion and shoot out filled action movies with lots of car chases that they would choose if I left them to their own devices. I want them to have fun, but I also want them to be exposed to good film and hopefully learn something along the way. There are lots of good movies that can serve both purposes.

From this vantage point of being in the midst of people who have little but still lead joy filled lives and trying to make the best of the situation with disadvantaged students whose futures have been put on hold, I watch all the events going on in the United States. Being in Kenya, it does not affect me directly at this point in time, but as an American, it obviously touches part of who I am. As I watch things unfold in the US, two things strike me. These are not meant to minimize what is at stake or diminish the need to address the serious injustices that exist in our country, but are just some thoughts on areas where I think we need to do better.

The first is that we seem to have lost all sense of perspective. A number of years ago while at IBM, there was a program that allowed employees to order self-help materials. Looking at the list of offerings and feeling quite stressed out at the time, I ordered a book on anxiety. I don’t remember why I was stressed out, but as is the case for most people, work can just be stressful at times. Although the book is long gone and I don’t recall what its title was or who wrote it, one thing that I learned from the book has stuck with me over the years. Although the book presented this technique as a way to combat anxiety, I find that I can apply it to many aspects of my life. The tip was to change the perspective. That’s it. It sounds so obvious as to be completely useless. However, as most truths in life, it’s so powerful because it is so simple. 

So how do you change perspective? One effective way is by distancing yourself in your mind in both space and time from the thing that is making you anxious, or as I feel more generally, the thing you are trying to consider or reflect upon. That is imagine yourself looking at the situation from a hot air balloon. Use something else if you are afraid of heights and a hot air balloon make you nervous, as that would defeat the whole purpose of the exercise. Imagine you’re looking at things from before the situation happened or way in the future when everyone, including you, has probably forgotten all about it or even a time when you are no longer inhabiting the planet. 

We’ve all had hundreds, or perhaps thousands, if you are truthful with yourself, of experiences in our lives where something was huge and important at the time, where life and death seemed to hang in the balance, that now we either can’t even remember or laugh about how much we overacted. I’m pointing to myself right now. So much for the life or death situation. I’m not saying that some events in our lives are not extremely important and perhaps even are truly life or death in scope, but rather trying to illustrate how space and time can change the perspective. Those who know my family situation, know the tragedies I’ve had to face in my life. Not that the pain every goes away, but things take on a different shape with the separation of time and space. Although I wouldn’t recommend you use this line with grieving person who has just lost someone close to them, but there is some truth in the trite and in most cases unhelpful cliche “Time heals all wounds.”

But we don’t need to wait years and move far away to create this separation to change the perspective when looking at a situation. We can do it in our minds, in our imagination, as a tool to reframe things and look at things from a different angle. In other words, to see things from a different perspective.

Another take on this same concept of separation in time and space is to consider our place in the universe. Although we act like we are, we are not the center of the universe. We are not even the center of our solar system. NASA puts out an Astronomy Picture of the Day that I love to look at: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. The picture from June 11, 2020, which you can find in archives, is one I especially love. It is a picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 1300, which is a breathtakingly beautiful barred spiral galaxy 70 million light years away from earth. 

Besides the sheer beauty of the galaxy, try to take in what a distance of 70 million light-years means. A distance of 70 million light-years means that it took light 70 million years to travel to earth. For those of you who don’t recall from high school physics, the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers/sec in the vacuum of space. This translates to 186,000 miles/second. If we convert light-years to miles, we find the NGC 1300 is about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from earth. Let that sink in for a moment. As it took the light from NGC 1300 70 million light-years to reach us, this means we are looking 70 million years into the past. We are not seeing NGC 1300 as it is today, but as it was 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Now let that sink in a bit.

The galaxy is over 100,000 light-years across, which is about the same size of our Milky Way galaxy. Like the Milky Way, NGC 1300 likely contains several hundred billion stars. Just for reference, the observable universe contains a billion trillion stars. NGC 1300’s spiral arms include blue clusters of young stars and pink clouds that are forming new stars. Our universe is ever-changing and evolving. As I’ve written before, God created the universe in a state of journeying—not just humankind, but creation as a whole—towards Himself. Marvel in the enormity of this proposition.

The human body contains approximately 20 chemical elements that play a role in our survival and health. With the exception of hydrogen, which was formed during the Big Bang, all the other elements we are made of were forged inside stars long ago and hurled into space by a supernova explosion. As Carl Sagan famously said, “We are made of star stuff.” Yet another aspect of the evolving universe and how we fit within it. We are not separate from the rest of God’s creation, but an integral part of it.

Yes, we are all infinitely important. God created and sustains us out of love. Jesus became one of us as God entered into His creation and took on human nature. Each one of us is a distinct and unrepeatable image of God’s infinite love. While most people today either don’t believe this or simply live as if they don’t believe it, from a simply cosmic perspective, we’ve lost perspective with respect to our place in creation. Imagine looking at ourselves from the perspective of NCG 1300. OK, ignore the fact that you would be looking 70 million years in the past and so we wouldn’t be here and all you would see are dinosaurs! We are so stuck in our ideologies and winner take all mentality that we have lost all perspective.

My second observation is that to a large extent we have lost the ability to see the underlying beauty in each other, in creation, and in manmade things that reflect both of these. We are so caught up in surface appearances that we often don’t see what’s on the inside. We are so fixed in our own ways of thinking that we are blinded from seeing the beauty right in front of us. We are constantly distracted by the noise of our busy lives and the never-ending news cycles that we often don’t even stop and look. On top of this, our society has become completely unforgiving. Life in the current culture has become a zero-sum game. There is no respect for differing points of view. There is no compromise. There is no appreciation for in the inherent beauty of truth itself.

As some of you may know I love music. I love all kinds of music, but specifically classical music, rock, jazz and blues. Sadly, I was not blessed with musical talent commensurate with my love of music, but that doesn’t inhibit me from thoroughly enjoying it. I can completely lose myself in Beethoven symphony, a Mozart concerto, or a Beatles or Led Zeppelin album (yes, they were called albums back then). I’ve listened to some of these pieces of music hundreds of times, but still continue to find deeper meaning and enjoyment from them. For me this is the measure of great music – being able come back to a piece of music again and again and always find something new in it and experience something deeper through it.

I like musicals, but I love opera. Yes, I can hear the snickering from anyone who has read this far. I’m sure I lost most people a page ago.  Like many people my age, my introduction to classical music came as a kid from cartoons. At the top of that list of cartoons is Bug Bunny. Those old enough will remember the “Rabbit of Seville” based on Rossini’s opera “The Barber of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc?” based on several of Richard Wagner’s operas.

When you say opera to someone, the picture that typically comes to mind are rather large opera singers wearing horned helmets screaming in each other’s faces. While this may be a somewhat accurate description of Richard Wanger’s operas (not the screaming, but perhaps right up in each other’s faces), many of which are based upon Norse mythology, it does not hold in general. My favorite operas are those that are about everyday people like Puccini’s La Boheme, Bizet’s Carmen and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Those of you who know opera, will pick up on the fact that all the opera’s I mentioned tell very tragic stories. While I also like comic opera, and how could I not as Mozart wrote several great comic operas, I tend to gravitate toward the tragic when it comes to opera. Maybe that is revealing something about me!

Back to Richard Wagner. While I find his music otherworldly I have to admit, I sometimes find the stage productions of his operas, which as I mentioned are often based on Norse mythology, a little too much. A lot of opera companies are streaming and making high quality video recordings of operas available on YouTube during the pandemic. Perhaps is the only way for them to keep their patrons engaged. I guess even in the midst of a global pandemic, you can find blessings. I already knew that, but this was an unexpected one.

I found a YouTube video of Wagner’s opera Die Walküre produced by the BBC that I recently watched. The novel thing about this performance of the opera is that the stage production was bare bones. Besides a few simple props like chairs, there was no stage scenery. The singers wore ordinary clothes, albeit formal dress, not costumes. There were no horned helmets in sight.  I can’t fault Wotan for wearing a tux, he’s the ruler of the gods after all. All the Valkyries (supernatural women who determined who lived and died on the battlefield) remained firmly planted on the ground during the famous Ride of the Valkyries. Most of you know this particular piece of music from the movie Apocalypse Now where it was used during the helicopter attack scene, which anyone who has seen the movie will never forget. In terms of this stripped down version of Die Walküre, think watching Nirvana on MTV Unplugged except in this case, it’s not the music that’s unplugged, but the stage production. Well actually the music is unplugged as a symphony orchestra doesn’t use electronic instruments, but you get the point.

This BBC production of Wagner’s Die Walküre allowed me to focus on the music and not be distracted or deterred by the surface elements of the opera, in this case the staging. In opera, the music is the thing. It’s what tells the story. It’s where the drama unfolds. It is where the true beauty lies. Yes, I could have just listened to the music with no video, but given that the libretto is in German, it would be impossible for me to follow the drama unfolding. With opera, you need to connect the music with the drama it is depicting to get the full impact.

The whole point of this operatic discourse was to give an example of searching out the intrinsic beauty in things—something that we as a country and as a world today do not do very well. Our current culture is much more ready, willing and able to find the faults in people and things. We need to instead look to the beauty that is inherent in each one of us. The beauty that is a reflection of the God who loved us into being.

As a world, as a culture, as a society, we need more perspective. We need to take a collective breath, step back, open up the aperture and look at things from a bigger picture point of view. We need to try look at our world and each other as the God who created us sees us. We need to better situate ourselves within God’s creation, which God created in a state of journeying, continuingly developing and evolving to its ultimate end when God will be all in all. We need look deep and see the inherent beauty in this creation and each other. Most importantly, we need to recognize Christ in every person.

Mungo ni mwema./God is good.

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, many of our HOPE families urgently need assistance with food and other basic necessities. With the lockdowns in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these families have no means to earn money to buy food and pay expenses. They need our help.

https://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website: https://hopegiveshope.com

Most of my blog posts as of late have concerned my ministry and my work, which I hope is understandable as that is what my life revolves around here in Kenya and my reason for being here. I’ve also tended to sprinkle in a number of theological reflections along the way as a means of processing and making sense of my experiences. However, in this post, I want to take a completely different tact and talk about a few absurdly stupid examples of what goes on in my everyday life. So, no tragic stories, no theology, and no asking for donations (which I’m sure everyone welcomes). Just everyday idiotic life stuff.

I don’t know much about cats and have never really had much of an interest in them. On the other hand, I’ve had dogs and been around dogs most of my life. If I get a pet when I return from Kenya, it will be another dog. In the neighborhood where I live in Mombasa there are a bunch of feral cats. When I go to put out the garbage on trash day, the cats see me and start making their way over to try to get into the tasty morsels of refuse I’m discarding. I used to try to shoo them away, but I don’t even bother anymore as they simply come back once I close the gate and go back inside. These cats also seem to like hanging out in my yard. My neighbors on one side have dogs and those on the other side have three kids. I’m guessing the relative solitude is what makes my yard the most desirable on my side of the street.

I usually don’t mind the cats being around except for when they get into my trash and that “one period of time a month” (which I now understand is not strictly the case for cats). This past week was the worst since I moved here. The cats nightly mating escapades and associated loud howls kept me up for three nights straight. I’m talking little to no sleep. I was a zombie, but who could sleep through that. I’m not exactly sure (I’m very naïve when it comes to these things), but I think there is only one female in the group along with three males.

Given the one female, I found it hard to believe that this type of activity could actually go on all night, so I did a little research on the subject. From what I learned, the female is ready to mate again in as little as five minutes and may allow up to 30 matings with multiple males in a given heat cycle. Well that explains it. I learned much more than this, but in the spirit of trying to maintain some sense of decorum in my blog posts, I’ll forgo giving any further details. I’ll leave it to you to look it up yourself if you are interested. However more than likely, most of you already know about the birds and bees of cats and I’m one of the few who was clueless.

By night three I had had enough. Armed with Google, I was intent on finding a solution, which I hoped didn’t come down to killing the little #@!$s. Just kidding, although I have to admit it did cross my mind. I found two viable solutions. The first was orange peels and the second was vinegar. I opted for vinegar as I was worried that orange peels would attract ants and I didn’t want to cause another problem by giving ants any reason to get anywhere near the house. I’ve already gone through the ant nightmare and don’t want to experience the pleasure again. Thank God for exterminators.

So, I got a spray bottle and mixed a 50% vinegar solution and sprayed it all over where the cats hang out. No longer did I finish spraying and go inside than I look out the window and the cats are laying down and have a grand old time right on the surfaces I had just sprayed. They didn’t even wait until the vinegar solution was dry. So much for that suggestion.

I was now left with no alternative (well there was still that other one, but I didn’t want to go there yet), but to resort to orange peels. The cats scattered when I came out the door as they usually do. I laid down the orange peels from two oranges. Luckily, I like oranges and even had them on hand. Lo and behold, the cats got one whiff of the orange peels and never came back. Who would have thought that these creatures that scour through my trash and love the smell of fish would be so turned off by a little citrus! I left the orange peels out overnight and as I feared, there were ants partaking of them the next morning. I got rid of the peels and washed away the ants. Fortunately, I have not seen any ants in the house since.

I have to admit that I probably don’t keep abreast of the latest coronavirus news as much as I should. I just don’t want to be consumed by the never-ending news cycle in which everyone has opinions which are diametrically opposed to each other and the commentator are more interested in pushing their ideological agenda than in seeking the truth, which is pretty much the case for any issue these days. Because of this, I had managed to shield myself from any of the conspiracy theories involving Covid-19. That is, until one day last week when I was in the office and greeted one of the priests who I saw walking by outside. We began to talk and not unexpectedly, the conversation turned to what was going on with the coronavirus. As we talked, he began to tell me how the coronavirus was linked to the new 5G mobile network. I wasn’t really buying into it as the idea that a virus could be transmitted by radio wave is obviously not possible.

I guess Father perceived my unbelief and proceeded to play a video on his phone for me. The person speaking in English in the video, who proclaimed to be a microbiologist, was espousing just this type of 5G conspiracy theory. It wasn’t the content that shocked me – people espouse a lot of stupid theories, but the language. Every other word that came out of the mouth of the person in the video was vulgar. The speaker was dropping f-bombs all over the place. I politely listened to the end of the video, but it took everything I had to not burst out laughing at the absurdity of the situation. When the video was complete all I could manage to do was to tell Father that I think I needed to go to confession after listening to that. I know Father was just trying to understand the issues, but I advised him that he needs to be more discriminating with his sources.

Kiswahili and English are both official languages of Kenya and the schools here teach classes in English. I don’t know for sure how familiar Kenyans are with English swear words. I get the sense that they have some understanding of them, but I’ve never really heard anyone here curse in English. In fact, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone curse. However, it’s more likely that people curse in Kiswahili. I don’t know any of those words nor do I really care to learn them.

One of my biggest frustrations here in Kenya is the unreliability of electrical power. Yes, I have not yet managed to shed all my attractions to creature comforts. Not only does any electrical appliance or device have to sit behind a surge protector, but the electricity can and will go off at any moment. Sometimes the outage is only for an hour or two, but at other times, the power can be off for most of the day. Power is usually restored by sundown or at least before I go to bed, but I have had to go to sleep a few times with the power still off. I usually have to endure a few outages a week. What most aggravates me is when I have to throw away food that is in the refrigerator or freezer.

I started shaving my head when I first began losing my hair and have been doing it now for quite a number of years. I just grab my hair clippers and go at it myself. I don’t use a guide, but simply use the clipper razor by itself resulting in the shortest possible buzz cut short of employing shaving cream and a disposable razor. I don’t aspire to the shiny look, so have never really tried this latter method. For that matter, I don’t necessarily aspire to shaving my head in the first place, but you have to go with the cards you are dealt. Actually, even if I did still have a full head of hair, I probably would still shave it. I’ve become so lazy that I would do it just to avoid the fuss of having to care for my hair.

I’m assuming by now you have figured out where I’m going with this (and this is not the first time it has happened). I’m shaving my head and right in the middle of it the power goes out. OK, it’s not like I have much to work with in the first place, but I would definitely be embarrassed to go out the way I looked – sort of punk, but not really. Luckily, I didn’t have to leave the house that day – one of the few advantages of the lockdown. I wasn’t happy about my current look, but not really a big deal. I’d just complete shaving my head once the power came back on. The power only stayed off for a few hours and I was able to successfully make myself half way presentable again when power was restored. Life was good again.

Since the pandemic started, I’ve pretty much turned into a vegetarian. This was not a conscious choice, but more a result of that fact that it is difficult for me to buy meat. Before coming to Kenya, I was never a big beef eater. Although I didn’t shy away from the occasional steak or hamburger, I survived much of my life on chicken with some occasional fish thrown in. In Mombasa, I don’t live close to a supermarket. As traveling during the pandemic is problematic, I have been buying all my food from small shops and little roadside markets near my house. There are some butcheries nearby, but thus far I don’t feel confident enough with their food handling to risk buying meat there.

As I had some chicken frozen in the freezer from a previous trip to the supermarket when the pandemic was just beginning, I had decided the day before to defrost a package of chicken thighs and legs so that I could cook it the next day. After finishing my hair cut and waiting for a while to make sure the power would stay on, I preheated the oven, seasoned the chicken and prepared it for baking. Not even ten minutes after I put the chicken in the oven, the power goes off again. I decided to wait a bit in the hope that the power would come back on and the chicken could finish baking – in reality it hadn’t even really started baking yet. No such luck. Now I’m really not happy. What do I do now? I don’t want to wait much longer and risk the chicken going bad. Finally, I decide to take the chicken out of the oven and fry it. Although the oven of my stove is electric, the burners are propane. As an aside, the propane tanks in Kenya are right next to the stove. All this kind of stuff used to freak me out when I first got here, now I don’t even think about it.

Although I love fried chicken, I didn’t really want to make it. Not only didn’t I really need all that extra fat, but I had just cleaned the whole house, including the kitchen and stove, from top to bottom the day before. Frying makes a mess. It doesn’t appear that splatter screens have been invented in Kenya yet (at least I have not been able to find one), so there was really nothing I could do about the oil that would splatter while I fried up the chicken. Resigned to the fact that my cleaning from yesterday (at least in the kitchen in and around the stove) was in vain, I prepared the chicken for frying and proceeded to cook it.  As expected, the frying made a little bit of a mess, but not too bad. Once the chicken was cooked, I removed it onto a paper towel lined plate to absorb some of the cooking oil and cool. Paper towels are not very common in Kenya. Instead, Kenyans primarily use napkins for everything, although you wouldn’t call them that here as that word is reserved for sanitary napkins. I’ve made that mistake a few times and have gotten strange looks as a result. Napkins are called serviettes (from the British) in Kenya.  While the chicken was cooling, I cleaned up the splattered oil from around the stove. Good as new – or at least good as yesterday.

No longer had I finished cleaning and washing the pans, dishes and utensils that I used for cooking, when the power decided to come back on. At that point I could have gotten upset, but I decided instead to not go there and just enjoy the fruits of my labor. Fried chicken was not the worse possible outcome. In fact, I quite enjoyed it.

Man is willed by the Creator as a relational being, as someone who is not sufficient unto himself but, rather, needs relationship, who is supposed to live with another and for another. Only in this relatedness to the other and for the other can he fulfill God’s will.

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)

We were blessed to be able to provide much needed additional food relief to the families of my Helping Orphans Pursue Education (HOPE) ministry this week. These families of the children HOPE supports with educational assistance continue to be severely impacted by the lockdowns imposed as a result of the coronavirus and are unable to earn money to eat. We were only able to distribute food this week due to the generosity of people who stepped up and helped financially with donations. The families were so appreciative of the food. Some had not eaten in days. Here is the story one of the families we helped.

Maira (*) is a cheerful and playful sixteen-year-old girl. She joined HOPE in 2012 when she was nine years old. As the family could not afford to pay for school, Maira had no formal education when HOPE began supporting her. She began first grade at an age several years older than the other students in her class. She is in now in eighth grade and was hoping to start secondary school next year, but that prospect has been jeopardized by the coronavirus.

Maira’s father died when she was only seven years old and her mother tragically passed away two years later. Both succumbed to HIV/AIDS complications. Maira is the last born of four children. After the death of their parents, the children were forced to live on their own in a mud house built by their parents.

Maira’s oldest brother got married several years ago and moved away, leaving Maira’s other brother, Aaron, to care for his siblings. Aaron, who was still a teenager at the time, became solely responsible for Maira and the oldest born, Hafsa, who is intellectually challenged. Aaron was force to drop out of school in eighth grade in order to work to support himself and his two siblings. As he has no trade skills, Aaron relies on casual jobs, such as carrying water with a handcart (there is no running water in the settlement where they live), to earn money for food. Sadly, he is only able to earn the equivalent of about $4 a week. This little money is all the three siblings have to live on.  

An aunt had been helping the family financially where she could, but now is unable to do so as she herself is struggling to earn enough to feed her own family during the pandemic. Since the lockdowns were put in place, it has been very difficult for Aaron to find work. Most days the three siblings only eat one meal and some days they go without food completely.

To make matters worse, walls of their mud house have collapsed several times during heavy rains. The community has come together to help the family rebuild the damaged walls, but they desperately need a sturdier structure in which to live. Unfortunately, at this point in time, the family is struggling just to eat. Fixing the house remains just a dream.

We have attempted to provide financial assistance for Aaron to attend vocational school and learn a trade, so that he can earn more money for the family. However, this has proven to be impossible thus far as he is the primary source of income for the family and must work so that they can eat.

Aaron, Maira, and Hafsa are extremely grateful for the food provided by HOPE and the generous donors who make the food distribution possible. Maira was overjoyed when she saw the bag of food we gave the family and said that she is going to celebrate now that they have something to eat. She also said that she is praying that we will be able to give them more food next week as the food we gave them will only last about five days.

* Names have been changed to protect people’s privacy.

You can be a lifeline for this family and others like them. Even a small amount can make a huge difference in the lives of those who have nothing. Please consider helping. You can donate online at http://www.mklm.org/RTarro.

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

As the name implies, the children that my HOPE (Helping Orphans Pursue Education) ministry project serves are orphans. Many are pure” orphans, meaning having lost both parents,  and some live with a single surviving parent – typically a single mother, but sometimes a single father. Others live with family members and, in some cases, community members who took them in. These families typically have families of their own and are supporting HOPE children in addition to their own children.

Pretty much all of our HOPE families live in single room dwellings, some of which are simply made of mud, and share bathrooms with other families within their densely populated settlements. They cook using propane, or sometimes wood charcoal, in this single room. In some places garbage and sewage can be seen along the roads and alleys are is there is no means for trash removal. Residents are forced to burn trash and many times the noxious smell of burning plastics fills the air.  Many places have no running water. Water, both for drinking, as well as bathing and cleaning, needs to bought and carried in.

Often there is only one wage earner in the family – typically the single mother (or in a few cases, a father). The unemployment rate in Kenya is very high and stable, decent paying jobs are scarce.  Women will typically sell items like fruits and vegetables or porridge from roadside markets. Other will earn money by cleaning houses. Most men are simple laborers who are forced to look for some kind of work every day. These families rely on the money they earn in one day to feed their entire family for that day.  They have no savings to tap into and no one to help them buy food and pay expenses if they can’t earn money.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns have presented significant challenges and additional hardships to our HOPE families, who already struggle to live, eat and provide for their children in the best of circumstances. With the current lockdown in Kenya, their livelihoods are severely impacted. Travel and movement restrictions have made it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for families to earn money to eat and survive. Even as the government encourages frequent hand washing to slow the spread of the virus, soap remains a luxury item. Buying food to feed their families takes precedence over buying soap. 

I’d like to tell you the story of one of our HOPE students. Maxmilla joined the HOPE project as a class eight student in 2011. HOPE funded the remainder of her primary school and secondary school education. Maxmilla is the oldest of three children. Maxmilla’s father died in 2009 of AIDS. After the death of her father, her mother became the breadwinner of the family by selling fried fish. But her mother also tragically succumbed to AIDS in 2013. After the death of the of their mother, Maxmilla, along with her brother and sister, were taken in by her uncle and his wife, who have four children of their own.

The family lives in Bangla, which is an informal settlement (slum) of about 50,000 residents. The people of Bangla live in corrugated iron huts, built one on top of each other, with waste-filled ditches snaked between them. The residents share a limited number of pit latrines and there is no running water.

Maxmilla is studying to be a teacher and is in her final year at a teachers training college. Her brother finished secondary school last year and is hoping to go to school to learn how to do electrical installation. Her sister is in primary school.

The education of Maxmilla and her siblings has been disrupted by the current COVD-19 pandemic as all schools in Kenya are closed during the lockdown. The three of them, along with the rest of the family, currently stay at home all day. This puts additional stress on the family as like many families in Kenya, they rely on schools to provide some of the children’s meals. With all the children at home, all meals are now dependent on what the breadwinner in the family can earn – in this case the uncle.

Maxmilla’s uncle is an electrician. He has no shop, but goes to where work is needed when called. Since the lockdown has been put in place, he has had no jobs since traveling to and entering into other people’s homes is very restricted. The family is really struggling to survive during the pandemic. There is little to eat.

Through the generosity of several donors, we were able to provide food packages to Maxmilla’s family as well as 43 other HOPE families. The food items included green grams, rice, milk, wheat and corn flour, sugar and soap. Like Maxmilla’s family, these families are all struggling to survive and eat during the current pandemic.

The food that we gave Maxmilla’s family and other families will help them eat for about the next five days, but these families need more help as the pandemic stretches on. Their livelihoods have been completely disrupted by the pandemic and they have no means to earn money to eat and pay expenses.

I am asking for your help in supporting the vulnerable families and children that I serve in Mombasa. These families need ongoing assistance to meet basic needs so they can survive the current pandemic. Any amount of financial assistance helps. I can’t emphasize enough what a difference a little financial assistance can make in the lives of people who have next to nothing on which to live.

Please consider helping. You can donate online at http://www.mklm.org/RTarro.

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

None of us likes celebrating the Easter Triduum liturgical celebrations by watching them on a phone or computer screen. While viewing the live stream of the Easter Vigil liturgy, not only did I sorely miss receiving Jesus in the Eucharist on this holiest of nights, but when after the Renewal of Our Baptismal Vows the priest blessed us with holy water, he sprinkled it in the direction of the camera. I could see the water coming towards me, but obviously felt nothing, although in my imagination, I did experience it in some way.

If one positive thing did come out of my only being able to live stream the Triduum services, was the fact that I was able to celebrate with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ from all over the world. The fact that the Triduum services, at least for Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, are celebrated at night coupled with the time zone differences between Kenya and the United States, meant that liturgies from the US would be lived streamed during the middle of the night here in Kenya. I opted instead to participate in liturgies from other countries around the world. For the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday I worshipped with Holy Rosary Parish in Ireland, for the Good Friday service with St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and for the Easter Vigil with the Archdiocese of Kuching in Malaysia. Although nowhere as good as the real thing, this was actually turned out to be, under the circumstances, a very nice and much different way for me to spend the three days leading up to Easter. Celebrating with people from different parts of the world renewed my appreciation of the universality of our Catholic faith. I love the fact I can walk into any church in the world (or in this case stream the Mass from any church in the world) and fit right in. I love the fact that we have a common liturgy grounded in the Last Supper and the Word of God. I think it is true that at any moment in the day, there is a Mass being celebrated someplace in the world. The whole world comes together in faith to worship our God in the sacrifice of the Mass continually at all times. Our world certainly does a lot of things wrong, but how great is it that we can offer to God at all times what is most pleasing to him. We at least have one thing, maybe the most important thing, right.

One of the most beautiful parts of the Easter Vigil celebration is the welcoming of new members into our Church. Obviously, this year there were no baptisms during the liturgy due to the lockdowns. I felt especially sad for the Catechumens, the Elect who were supposed to be baptized and make their sacraments, but were unable to do so due to the coronavirus restrictions. During the Easter Vigil Mass that I watched, the Archbishop of Kuching, Malaysia reached out to the Catechumens in a special way during his homily. He talked about the fact that he prayed that the they would be able to be baptized sacramentally into the Church very soon, but that in the interim they are assured salvation through a Baptism of Desire. In this time of crisis, there are so many people who need our prayers – the sick, the needy, the vulnerable, those at risk of contracting the virus, medical professionals and others who put their lives at risk for the sake of others, those who have lost loved ones, and those who have died. However, let us not forget those who struggle spiritually and are deprived of spiritual needs. I will be praying especially for those who so much desire to be part of the Body of Christ and have prepared to do so, but are prohibited from doing so during the lockdowns.

One of my favorite prayers from the wealth of liturgical prayers we enjoy as Catholics is the Easter Proclamation or Exsultet. We only hear it recited once a year at the Easter Vigil Mass. I guess we can classify this under the category that less is more. Although I love the words of the Exsultet so much and would be happy to hear them more often, it is so special to only hear them proclaimed at the Easter Vigil celebration, especially after the darkness of Good Friday. These words stuck with me from the reciting of the Exsultet at this year’s Easter Vigil.

This is the night when Christians everywhere, washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

I can’t help of thinking of these lines in light of the current coronavirus crisis. For some reason, God has allowed the pandemic to occur and perhaps there is also a reason that he has allowed the pandemic to peak during the Easter Triduum. As I’ve written about many times previously, I believe that everything God does is for a purpose. During the pandemic, we in a sense die with Christ, but now are raised up with him in the glory of his resurrection on Easter. The line from the Exsultet says that we are restored to grace so that we can grow together in holiness. Our God, who brings good out of evil, is presenting us with a not so subtle opportunity to grow in holiness together. The pandemic has forced us all to stop what we were doing, stand back from the rat race, and reassess everything. I view this as a grace and a gift. I know that God doesn’t will the death of anyone because of the virus, but in the midst of all the tragedy and suffering, he is right here with us. But more than that, he is using what is happening for a greater good. I firmly believe this.

I came across this quote the other day which puts the resurrection of Jesus in a somewhat different light. In the midst of all the current suffering in world, I found it comforting to focus on the victorious aspect of Jesus’s resurrection.

He took all of our sins, brought them down, and buried them himself. Nobody could understand that. Even the devil didn’t know what was going on! God tricked him! Right when the devil thought he was defeating God, God defeated him.

Steve Ray from Stations of the Cross

Some people have so much trouble processing the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. And from a purely human perspective, it indeed makes no sense. Even the devil couldn’t understand what was going on. As devil was doing what the devil does, that is trying to separate us from God, he was falling right into the trap that God had set for him. The devil, the father of lies, who tempted Judas and hardened the hearts of the the Jewish leaders, thought that he had the upper hand, but as with all sin, the goodness we think we see in it is all an illusion, a lie. Like satan, if we are not humble, God allows us to think that we are getting away with something when we do what we want rather than what God wants, when if fact we are not. This is why I believe that humility is so important to our spiritual life. Who was more humble that Jesus – the creator of all that is who came down into his creation to live among us?   When we are humble, we become more like Christ. When we are humble we are able to love more like Christ.

The devil thought that he had foiled God’s plans, when in fact what was going down was the greatest thing that ever happened to humanity (and that will ever happen). The devil, who Jesus tell us was a murder from the beginning, is in fact the one whose lies led to the redemption of the world.  The Church Fathers even talk about the devil in mocking terms saying that Jesus has tied up and defeated the devil, thereby freeing us from the one who held us for ransom. Or as St. Paul addresses the lord of darkness who brought death into the world by tempting Adam and Eve, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1Corinthians 15:55). St. Paul also gives the answer. “Death is swallowed up in victory.” (1Corinthians 15:54) We need to celebrate as this is our victory in Christ. In Jesus, death has no more power over us.

I also came across this quote from Bishop Barron this week.

The power that has held us ransom has been overthrown; the dark cloud that has brooded over our lives, turning us in on ourselves and outward in violence, has been removed.

Bishop Robert Barron

Again, these words also speak to me in the context of the current coronavirus crisis. The dark clouds that have brooded over our lives and turned us in on ourselves – fame, fortune, power, or whatever it is we may have been chasing – have been overthrown. They have been overturned by the current reality of the coronavirus crisis in which we live, but also overthrown in the light of Christ’s resurrection.  God is giving us the chance to start anew. As is stated in the book of Revelation, “Behold, I am making all things new.” The power that has held us ransom has been overthrown. It is now up to us what we do with this opportunity. As the profession of faith response from the Eucharistic Prayers from the Mass states and which the Archbishop of Kuching, Malaysia quoted several time in his Easter Vigil homily, let us pray “Save us, Savior of the world, for by your Cross and Resurrection you have set us free.”

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, many of our HOPE families urgently need assistance with food and other basic necessities. With the lockdowns in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these families have no means to earn money to buy food and pay expenses. They need our help.

https://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website.

https://hopegiveshope.com

Being isolated at home alone presents some challenges. While everyone should be isolating at home to protect themselves and prevent the spread of the coronavirus, some of us have to do it alone.  In order to not go crazy, I have had to come up with ways to fill up my days and keep some sense of structure.  I’ve been doing this by taking a number of online classes, reading, continuing in my struggle to learn Kiswahili, and praying. Given that this is Holy Week, I’ve also been streaming the Easter Triduum liturgies and have downloaded and watched several videos reflecting on the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. I’ve been pretty disciplined and regimented in my activities. I don’t spend time just laying around or sleeping for hours on end. I think this type of regiment is the best way for me to not only survive, but thrive during this crisis. The other thing I’ve obviously been doing is writing these blog posts. I’m not sure who actually reads my blog, but I will continue posting to it in any event, as the process of writing it helps me a lot. My blog provides a mechanism for me to reflect on various things and put my thoughts down on paper so to speak. Thinking of things in your head is one thing. Actually having to formulate ideas enough to be able to express them coherently in a written reflection is another. Whether I succeed or not is another question, but the process helps me cope with things and that is good enough for me. I would love it if others get some benefit from my blog posts, or at least get to keep up with what I’m doing and thinking, but the process of writing the posts in itself is important to me right now.

While I have always tried to include some sort of religious or spiritual reflection in my blog posts in the past, the primary focus of my posts was to share my mission experiences with my family, friends, and anyone else who cared to know about my life and work here in Kenya. Given that I’m pretty much confined to my house, there just really isn’t a lot of experiences I can share at this particular point in time. I wish things were different and I could go back to working in my ministry, but our Lord has other plans. I trust in him and try to do the best I can under the circumstances. Being alone at home has given me a lot more time to think and reflect on things – my life, the world around me, my faith, and my relationship with God – and my blog posts, not surprisingly, have turned in this direction.  I have no formal theology training so to speak, so what I say is just the work of a poor sinner trying to make sense of what I believe and why in the midst of what  is going on in the world around us.

As yesterday was Good Friday, I streamed and watched the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion.  As I don’t have wi-fi, I had to stream the liturgy from my cell phone (I actually used my phone as a hot spot and watched the live stream on my laptop). The live stream that I watched was from St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Yes, the Mass was in English. I chose this liturgy as I wanted one that was around 3 PM local time, the time that we believe Jesus died.

I love the Easter Triduum liturgies and the Good Friday liturgy is no exception. The readings are so powerful, beginning with the first reading’s account of the prophet Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. The parallels between the Suffering Servant and Jesus are hard to miss and it is therefore no wonder that the Church sees Jesus as fulfilling the prophesy of the Suffering Servant. The Responsorial Psalm contains, what is for me, one of the most heartbreaking  verses in all of scripture – “I am forgotten like the unremembered dead; I am like a dish that is broken.” When I want to contemplate what Jesus must have felt like hanging there on the Cross, rejected by his own people and abandoned by his friends, I need to go no further than this verse.  In the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, St. Paul tells us “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way”. All I can say is lucky for me or else I wouldn’t stand a chance.  My mode of operation is more often than not “For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.”, a great line from St. Paul’s Letter to Roman’s which I have quoted many times in the past and probably will continue to quote many times in the future as it perfectly encapsulates for me my struggles to love as God loves us.

While the readings and responsorial psalm provided me with a lot to contemplate, the Good Friday Liturgy is centered around St. John’s Passion Narrative. There is enough in the few pages of this narrative to contemplate for the rest of my life. However, one thing that struck me from yesterday’s reading of the passion narrative, which I’d like to explore is that of five figures who appear in the narrative and played a role in the events surrounding the passion and death of Jesus. Those five figures being St. Peter, the centurion, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and St. John. For those of you paying close attention and who are really on the ball, will say “Hey wait a minute. There is no centurion mentioned in the St. John’s Good Friday Passion Narrative.” And you would be correct. However, the centurion appears in St. Matthew’s Passion Narrative, which is read on Palm Sunday. Since these are just two different accounts of what happened on that day almost 2000 years ago, I’d like to include the centurion also.

I know many people question why Catholics pray to saints when we can just go directly to the big guy. While this is certainly true, as I’ve expressed many times, I firmly believe that God wills that we all work together for the salvation of all. This includes those who have died and those of us still on the battlefield fighting the good fight. For me, saints also serve as models for how to live my lives in union with God and how to confront the challenges that I encounter in living out my faith. We are blessed to have two millennia of saints to learn from, saints who come in all different shapes and sizes. Saints are not porcelain figures who lived in some sort of perfect universe, but rather are real people with real struggles, problems, and temptations like you and me. Some saints did a better job than others from beginning to end. However, in the end, all that matters is where we end up. We need to run the race and fight the good fight, but there will always be struggles along the way. What matters is how we react to these challenges. The saints that I relate best to are those who struggled along the way, like I do. That’s why the saints I relate best to are those like St. Paul, St. Augustine, and yes, St. Peter. While St. Peter didn’t necessarily have the sordid pasts of St. Paul and St. Augustine, he obviously was a flawed person like all of us. And yet, Jesus chose Peter as the rock on which to build his Church. While St. Paul and St. Augustine did not live exemplary lives as young men, they are now not only saints, but two of the most important figures in the history of the Church.

Peter was the type of person who often seemed to operate in the mode of open mouth and insert foot into mouth. I lived in the Boston area for many years and for much of that time my bishop was Cardinal Sean O’Malley.  Cardinal O’Malley described St. Peter as a cross between Archie Bunker and Ralph Kramden (for those of us old enough remember these television characters). At one point, Jesus said to Peter “Get behind me Satan. You are a stumbling block to me.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. St. Peter, the rock on which Jesus will build his church, denies he even knows Jesus and completely abandons him when the going gets tough. He is no where to be found at the crucifixion. And yet despite his shortcomings, Peter really loved Jesus. He just wasn’t perfect and struggled with things as we struggle with things. In the end, Peter gave up his life for Jesus, by crucifixion, like Jesus. I relate so much to St. Peter especially because of his shortcomings, but pray through his intercession that I may love Jesus as he did.

When Jesus expired on the cross and he saw the earthquake and all that was happening, the centurion exclaimed, “Truly, this was the Son of God!” Here you have a pagan and a Roman official, who was expected to worship the emperor as a living god, making this heartfelt confession of faith. I view the centurion as representative of those of us who at times stray down the wrong path and away from God due to addictions or being caught up in sin, but who keep their hearts open to the inflowing of grace that God so much wants to lavish on each one of us. When touched by God, the centurion responded in faith. I have no doubt that I will continue at times to go off the track, but if I am receptive to God’s grace, God will draw me back.

In the Passion Narrative, we are told that Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man and secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews. Joseph took Jesus’s body, wrapped it in clean linen and laid it in his new tomb.  In the Gospels of Mark and Luke, we also learn that Jospeh of Arimathea was a virtuous and righteous man who was looking for the kingdom of God. He was a respected member of the council, but had not consented to their decision and action. I see in Joseph of Arimathea someone who authentically loved Jesus, but did so from from the shadows out of fear of retribution. Joseph of Arimathea is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. I look to him for the strength and guidance to boldly proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ even in difficult times. Being a Christian, much less a Catholic, is extremely difficult in today’s culture. We face many of the same challenges that Joseph of Arimathea faced in proclaiming the faith. I pray for his help to be the witness that Jesus calls me to be.

In the passion account, Nicodemus brings a mixture of myrrh and aloes, which weighed about one hundred pounds, and assists Joseph of Arimathea to prepare the body of Jesus for burial. From earlier in John’s Gospel, we know that Nicodemus was not only a Pharisee, but a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews. Nicodemus is the one who came to Jesus at night to discuss his teachings. In this discussion, we hear perhaps the most quoted words that Jesus ever spoke, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. (John 3:16) Later on in John’s Gospel, Nicodemus defends Jesus by telling the Pharisees that the law requires that a person be heard before being judged. To me, Nicodemus represents those challenging time when our job or position brings us face to face with situations where they may have to make difficult decisions between what our job is asking do and what they know to be right. In today’s world, many people face these types of challenges with real consequences on their ability to provide for themselves and their families. As seen by his discussion with Jesus, Nicodemus also represents a sincere desire to accept and understand Jesus’s teachings.  Not that we can always completely understand why some things are the way they are, but because we love God and know that everything he does for us is for our benefit, we accept in faith and love what Jesus taught and continues to teach us through the Church. We see from Nicodemus that the more we know Jesus, the more we love him. Nicodemus is also proclaimed a saint by the Catholic Church. I pray to Nicodemus that I may continue my lifelong journey to know Jesus better and in doing so grow ever closer to him.

Finally we come to St. John, who tradition holds to be the beloved disciple, the one who Jesus loved. John is not only one of the twelve, but part of Jesus’s inner circle so to speak, who was selected to witness the most important events in the life of Jesus, such as the transfiguration. John is the only apostle who remained with Jesus to the end, standing by the cross as Jesus hung dying. John is the one who took Mary into his home after Jesus’s death. However, John is also the one who in Mark’s Gospel, along with his brother James, asks Jesus to sit one on his right and the other on is left in his glory. In other words, they are angling for the best spots in heaven. In Matthew’s Gospel it is their mother who makes the request. I see John as someone who in all respects seems to be the perfect disciple, but yet was tempted by the lure of glory and honor. We all in some way look for approval and recognition for what we do, but Jesus warns “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.” (Matthew 6:16) I pray to St. John for his help to always act out pure giving of myself and not what I will get out of it. As the devil tempted Jesus with power and glory, it is a certainty that he will tempt us in the same way.

Jesus’s mission here on earth comes to its fulfillment in the events recalled in the Passion Narrative. Jesus’s death and the resurrection, which we look forward to on Easter Sunday, are at the core of our faith and without which our faith makes no sense. The events of these few days changed everything. They changed our world. In the midst of the evil we recall in Jesus’s passion and death as well as the challenging events that we are currently undergoing here in the world today, we can gain insight into our own struggles and how to overcome them by looking at the lives of the saints. Saints are persons just like us, with the same imperfections and hangups that we do. Saints are persons who at times struggled to live the kind of life that Jesus asks us to live, but persevered until they got it right by fixing their eyes on Jesus. Most importantly, saints are what we are called to be. It is why God created us in the first place.

Before I came to Kenya, I would often listen to Relevant Radio, a Catholic radio station, while driving or stuck in traffic. One program that I would sometimes catch is called Busted Halo. I always thought that was a perfect name for a show that focuses the reality of living out our faith in the real world. As the show states, “we are all saints in the making yet our life’s journey is fraught with imperfections, struggles, and mistakes. Each of us sports a Halo that is either dented, scratched, tarnished… in some way Busted. God loves us despite this and continually calls us to polish our halos up to a nice golden shine.” Nicely said.

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, many of our HOPE families urgently need assistance with food and other basic necessities. With the lockdowns in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these families have no means to earn money to buy food and pay expenses. They need our help.

https://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website.

https://hopegiveshope.com

I’m sure we will all remember this Palm Sunday for the rest of our lives. With our churches closed because of the lockdown, the best we could do was stream Mass on our computers or phones. As my home parish, as well as any of the parishes that I’ve belonged to in Rhode Island and Massachusetts over the course of my life, were not streaming masses, I decided to virtually participate in the Mass being celebrated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. I decided on St. Patrick’s given the fact that NYC is now the epicenter of the global coronavirus outbreak and that Cardinal Dolan, who I always enjoy listening to, was the main celebrant for the Mass. While participating in the Mass virtually was somewhat satisfying, it just didn’t feel completely right, even though I know it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. Upon further reflection, I know I should feel blessed that I had the opportunity to stream the Mass, as many Kenyans with whom I live and work don’t have the means to do this. As a Catholic, I firmly believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. As the Eucharist is the “source and summit of our Christian lives”, as Vatican II tells us and as many of us feel in our bones, not having access to Communion is difficult. We miss uniting with Jesus in this most intimate way. Catholicism is a sacramental religion in which visible realities, such as the bread and wine, are in fact invisible realities, the body and blood of Jesus. Unfortunately, when experiencing Mass over an internet connection, we miss out on these realities. While we can make a spiritual communion during online Masses, streaming the Mass just does not allow us to receive Jesus sacramentally. It’s just the reality of the current times in which we are living.

I love that my Catholic faith is filled with Sacramentals, such as holy water, and particularly relevant for Palm Sunday, palms. As I watched a small number of participants in the Mass streamed from St. Patrick’s Cathedral holding palms, I so much wanted to hold my own palm. I’ve been able to hold a palm on Palm Sunday for every year of my life up until now. I especially missed having a palm during the reading of the Passion Narrative. This whole experience has made me even more appreciative of how holistic our Catholic faith is. We praise God not only with our hearts and minds, but with our whole bodies. We experience God’s love for us and the outpouring of his grace on us spiritually, but also physically.  During this time of crisis, I miss being sprinkled with holy water, smelling incense and burning candles, and yes, palms. I’m sure many of my fellow Catholics feel the same way.

None of us knows why God is leading us through these challenging times. What makes matters worse is that at a time where we long to be closer to God and be comforted by him, the circumstances (lockdowns, social distancing) make it difficult to do so in the manner that we are accustomed to and desire. What immediately comes to mind for me when I think about the lockdown and its impact on our spiritual lives, are the number of saints who experienced a “dark night of the soul”. Great saints, such as St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux and Mother Theresa among others, experienced feeling of abandonment by God for long stretches of time.  In some mysterious way, God uses a sense of absence, abandonment, and even despair to strengthen our resolve to believe and bring us even closer to him. At least for me, the current lockdown has given me a greater appreciation of how much I have to be thankful for – both in my spiritual life and my life in general. We have no choice but to contemplate what we have when the things we previously all took for granted have been taken away. However, as we now hopefully all more clearly see, everything in our lives and everything we have is a gift from God – unmerited and undeserved. As St. Therese famously said – “Everything is grace.” We who thought we controlled and provided for ourselves are now faced with the stark reality that this is not the case. We, in fact, do not control anything – even though our current culture and many times, we ourselves, think that we do. We are completely dependent on him who created us and holds us in existence.

In the beginning of the reading from the Palm Sunday Mass (Matthew 21:1-11), during the blessing of the palms, we hear how Jesus sent two of his disciples into the village where they would find an ass tethered and a colt with her. Jesus instructed the disciples to untie the ass and the colt and return with them. Jesus told them that if anyone should say anything, simply reply that “the master has need of them.”. Although I love the reading of the Passion Narrative, this passage is what most stood out for me from Sunday’s Mass. In this passage I hear Jesus calling out to us – “the master has need of you”. Although God is all-powerful and could end the coronavirus crisis in an instant, I believe that he wills that we all participate in a resolution and work together to get through the crisis. God wants us to help each other and give of ourselves as best we can under the circumstances. God did not cause the current pandemic, for God is love and can never create evil, but for some mysterious reason, which we may never understand in this lifetime, he permits it. As St. Thomas Aquinas explains, “God allows evil only so as to make something better result from it.” Do I completely understand why God works this way? No, but I trust in him. As the prophet Isaiah tells us “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9) God is in control, not us. God just asks that we place our trust in him. Our job is to do the best we can to help each other get through this crisis and leave the rest to God.

I do want to also point out that when Jesus said “the master has need of them”, the them referred to an ass and a colt, not some stately horse or other more prestigious or intelligent animal or thing. Jesus chose a lowly donkey to fulfill his mission. I feel comforted in the fact that if God can work through a donkey, he can hopefully also work through me. We don’t accomplish things, rather God accomplishes things through us. God just asks that we be willing participants and cooperate with him. How blest the donkey was to be part of Jesus’s mission, but we are all given the same opportunity. Jesus constantly calls us to to work with him, all we need to do is consent.

So, what is God calling us to do? Each of us can only answer that for ourselves. We need to each discern what God is asking of us during this difficult time. It’s not as if most of us don’t now have more free time, given the lockdown, in which to think and discern. The increased frequency of my blog posts being a case in point. :0) Believe me, I know how hard it is to step back from the never ending to-do list. Before coming to Kenya, I naively thought that the proverbial to-do list would go away once I was in mission. I’d be living the simple life of a missioner after all. Unfortunately, that has not been my experience, which may have more to do with my personality than mission life. You get what you make of things. Life is a never-ending learning process and I’m still learning how to let go.

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul tells us that “faith comes from hearing” (Romans 5:17). That is, we need to listen – listen with our ears, listen with our minds, and listen with our hearts. I struggle with this as much as anyone. My mind is always going in one hundred different directions. This is my favorite quote, which has been floating around on the internet and captures exactly how I so often feel.

“My mind is like my internet browser. 19 tabs open with 3 of them frozen & I have no idea where the music is coming from.”

I’m guessing many others can relate to this also. One of the things that I’m trying to work on during the lockdown is to disconnect and try to hear better – to better listen to what others are telling me, listen to what my body is telling me, and most importantly to listen to what God is saying to me. Only in solitude can this truly happen and I have plenty of that at the present time while being locked up alone in my apartment for weeks on end. Now if I can only find which browser tab the music is coming from so I can close it!

I framed most of this reflection in religious terms. It is Holy Week after all. However, I’d like to end with a quote from Winston Churchill. Although the quote is from the dark days of World War II, I think it also has great applicability to the current pandemic crises and what we need to do as a country and as a world. The world has had many dark days across the span of time and will undoubtedly have many more in the future. Dark days are inevitable. What matters is how we react to them and what we do to help each other get through them. God is giving us the opportunity to come together and change our world, to bring something good out of this great evil. We all have a part to play – some big and some small. There are so many heroic medical professionals on the front line, but also many people in the background struggling to keep food and other necessities accessible so that we can live. Everyone matters and everyone’s response is crucial. I believe this is the way God wants it. We just need to stop, listen, and accept our part.

Do not let us speak of darker days; let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days– the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.”

Winston Churchill

―

P.S. I was going to entitle this blog post “I’m an Ass” as I’m sure it would entice more people to actually click on the blog link and read it. While it would certainly be an appropriate title for the post given the content, I decided that anyone who cares about me and what I have to say would read the post without the click bait.

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, many of our HOPE families urgently need assistance with food and other basic necessities. With the lockdowns in place to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, these families have no means to earn money to buy food and pay expenses. They need our help.

https://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website.

https://hopegiveshope.com

As is the case with most people, I’ve been pretty much confined to my house for the past few weeks and likely will be for the foreseeable future. I had a bacterial skin infection on my foot that required me to go hospital every day last week for intravenously administered antibiotics. Fortunately, the antibiotic cycle seems to have worked and my foot improves with each passing day. With my hospital visits hopefully behind me, my only reason to go out of the house now is to buy food, which I do sparingly. I stocked up on a lot of canned and dry goods, but these won’t last forever. Unfortunately, there is no supermarket close to me and I have to go to “town” if I need something from the market. As it is not safe to take public transportation, which translates to stuffing into a minivan and ignoring all social distancing guidelines, I have to take a taxi. Other than things which I can only get from the supermarket in town, I buy other food like fruits and vegetables from a local street vendor who I have bought from since I moved here. I suppose the supermarket food is safer, but to shop there, I would need to travel back and forth to town and be in the midst of many more people. Everything is a tradeoff. I can’t control everything, but I hopefully I’m making good decisions to minimize my potential exposure to the coronavirus.

The most frustrating part for me of this whole situation is the fact that I can’t really do much in the way of ministry work. My ministry is why I’m here in Kenya. If not for the pandemic, we would be preparing for the three weeks break between the first and second terms of the three-term school year here in Kenya. During school breaks, we run tutorials four times a week. As I’ve mentioned before, tutorials are my favorite part of my ministry job. I love working with the children and getting them to think in new and different ways. My focus is typically with the secondary school students working with them on math, chemistry, biology and physics. I not only work with them on their standard curriculum, but I also try to nurture in them a desire to understand how the physical world works. I try as best I can to prepare the students to pass their tests, but I also want them to understand the underlying concepts and how they apply to everything we see in the world around us.

Maryknoll gave us the opportunity to go home before travel back to the US would no longer be possible. Much to the chagrin of my family, I chose to stay in Kenya. This was for two reasons. First, if I left, it may be very difficult to travel back to Kenya for quite a while. I want to be here when it is safe to resume my ministry and be working to get things back to normal for the children and their families who we serve as quickly as possible. I also want to be in a position to help my ministry children and their families in any way possible during the crisis. Secondly, while in Kenya, I try as best I can to live in solidarity with the Kenyan people. I’m blessed to have a stipend and health coverage that continue during the lockdown. These types of benefits are completely out of reach of any of the families with whom I work with. However, as a whole, I try as best I can to live like and among those I work with. For me, just leaving was not consistent with the solidarity I strive for.

I didn’t make my decision lightly. The healthcare system in Kenya is fragile at best. They don’t have the technology and resources that are available in the US and other more developed countries to deal with a pandemic. Also, social distancing is an impossibility for many Kenyans. They live in overcrowded, small dwellings and settlements. Many live in informal settlements or slums. While I can isolate myself, I do need to come out to at least buy food. This requires some contact with others and I’m sure those I encounter are not all practicing social distancing best practices. I’m also concerned about social unrest and what will happen as time goes on given that people can’t earn a living and therefore afford to buy food and water. Many people here barely earn enough money in a day to buy food to eat that day. With the government restrictions enforcing closures and lockdowns, many people’s livelihoods are shut down. Many of these people do manual labor or sell things on the street, which is very difficult with the restrictions in place. No one has savings accounts to dip into. The country is not going to pass a stimulus package to help those in need. Kenya has just implemented a dusk to dawn curfew and there have already been instances of police brutality enforcing the curfew.

For now, the number of COVID-19 cases in Kenya is relatively low. However, the reason for this is not really known. It may be that there are a lot more cases than have been reported as there is no robust testing capability here. It also may be that Kenya, and Africa in general, is still behind the curve (as compared to the US, Europe and Asia) and that things will get much worse before they get better. 

All I can do is try to stay as safe as possible by limiting contact with other people, which is especially important here as social distancing for many other people here is not a practical reality. Luckily, the electrical power, which can sometimes go off for a day at a time, and my cell phone data, which is my only access to the internet, have been pretty reliable since I’ve been self-quarantined. Being confined to home, I’m using a lot of data on my phone (no home internet, only hotspot from my cell phone), but it’s my only link to the outside world

I know that a lot of people question where God is during the pandemic. To me the answer is simple, although some people may sarcastically say simplistic. God is right here in the midst of it. I believe that God created everything out of love. We, as human beings created in God’s image and likeness, as well as all God’s creation, are a manifestation of the abundance of this love. Thus, the underlying principle governing the entire cosmos is love. This is obviously often hard to see in our sinful world and difficult to comprehend in the midst of a crisis like the current pandemic. So, if the underlying principle of the universe is love, why does it at times not appear that way and how does a pandemic fit into the framework of a universe based on love?

First, love is only love if it is feely chosen. You can’t force someone to love you. I would take this a step further and say that love, where there is no possibility to not love, is not truly love. From this perspective, sin is choosing not to love.

I also believe that suffering follows from love, at least in the currently as yet imperfect world in which we live. Surely no one wants someone they truly love to suffer, but suffering follows from vulnerability and vulnerability, like free choice, is also a prerequisite for love. In fact, vulnerability follows from love specifically because love must be freely chosen. If love requires free choice, there is always the possibility that love is rejected. Thus, in order to love, you must become vulnerable. And vulnerability leads to suffering both in our lives and in creation as a result of our not choosing to love. As C.S. Lewis put it:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. … To love is to be vulnerable.” – C.S. Lewis

I’m certainly not going to try to answer the question of why there is suffering in the world. People have pondered this question since the beginning of time. Our faith tells us that God uses suffering to bring about a greater good. While I believe this is true, all you have to do is look at a crucifix, suffering remains a great mystery. However, in some way, I believe the mystery ties back to vulnerability as a perquisite for true love.

I firmly believe that God is eternally perfect and unchanging love, who does not need us to be more perfect. However, at the same time, in some sense, he makes himself vulnerable by loving us. I don’t mean to imply that this makes God any less than perfect, but rather, somehow mixed into the infinite love that is God, is a giving of himself with the possibility that the gift is not accepted. Why does God do this? Because he is love and can do nothing other than love with an infinite love. He loves to the point of giving entirely of himself. He loves us more than we love ourselves. And after lavishing all this underserved love on us, he allows us to freely choose, because without free choice there is not true love. He allows us to accept or reject his love, which necessitates a constant and continuing, not one time, answer from us. At any time, we can choose not to love God in return. But God still loves us infinitely and unconditionally at all times, regardless whether or not we love him back. In some sense, God makes himself vulnerable to our reciprocation of his love because he allows us to make a choice.  But God takes things a step further. When we fail to love him in return, when we chose not to love others, God calls us back. For God is all merciful. This follow directly from the fact that God is love, for mercy is what love looks like when directed at a someone who rejects that love. Because we are sinners, who at times don’t choose the path of love, God loves us through the lens of mercy. Mercy follows from God’s infinite love for us and the fact that our love often falls short.

But God’s inexhaustible love for us extends beyond just being merciful. Look at the famous parable of the Prodigal Son. The father spotted the son when he was off in the distance. The reason he was able to do this is that he was out there looking for the son. So, it is with God. God doesn’t just passively wait for us to return to him, but rather is always calling us back. He is always anxiously waiting for us to come back to him. In some sense, God is again making himself vulnerable to our return to him. He wants so much to forgive us, that he proactively nudges us back towards himself, but always respecting our freedom to choose.

In his great poem “The Hound of Heaven”, Francis Thompson beautifully describes how our loving God persistently pursues us, calling us back even as we flee him. Who does this? Only one who loves without limit and makes himself vulnerable to our response.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years;I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

– Francis Thompson

As Christians, we know that God’s love comes to fulfillment in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who is “the image of the invisible God” (Collosians 1:15).  Jesus tells us that “whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mt 16:24). Jesus, the Son of God and through whom everything that is came to be, took up his cross and suffering for us until he had given entirely of himself in death. The challenge for us, is that Jesus asks us to follow him and do the same. Jesus asks us to seek out our crosses and actively take them up. This does not just mean resignation with respect to any tragedies or suffering that we may encounter in life, but rather a willingness to carry our cross as he carried his. However, it even goes further than this. I think Jesus is also exhorting us to help carry the crosses of others. As he helps carry our crosses, he asks that we also help those who are suffering and in need our help. How can it be any other way? As Jesus carried his cross for us, we are asked to carry the crosses of others. We all in this together with and through Jesus.

This idea of taking up our cross is so counter cultural in today’s secular world where happiness means immediate gratification and satisfying our every desire for pleasure – a world where there is no sin and suffering is to be avoided at all costs. However, God calls us to something more than sensual and intellectual gratification. We are called to love God and love our neighbor, which at times entails suffering.

Why I can’t say I completely understand suffering, I do believe that God allows suffering because it enables us to participate in the redemptive work of Jesus and become more like him. As St. John Vianney said

“Nothing makes us more like Our Lord than carrying His Cross.”

St. John Vianney

Suffering enables us to know our Lord as he knows himself. How do we possibly accomplish this? Our Lord gives us the answer “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11:28). Jesus doesn’t leave us to fend for ourselves, but is with us every step of the way if we give ourselves to him.

In final scheme of things, there are two paths which lead us to God: the path of great love and the path of great suffering. However, if you think about it, these are both really the same path. For if you truly love, it will eventually entail suffering.

So where is God during this coronavirus crisis? Where is God with all the suffering that is going on in the world at the current time? He is right in our midst. He is right here loving us, pursuing us, calling us back to him, urging us to pick up our crosses, to accept any suffering that comes our way and through that suffering to become more like Christ. God is right here exhorting us to love our neighbor during these times when we need each other most, loving them the way Christ loves us. By loving like Christ, by suffering willingly like Christ, we become like Christ and more fully approach what it means to be truly human, to be what God intends us to be. 

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. The work we do makes a real and lasting difference in the lives of the children we serve. Although schools are currently closed during the coronavirus crisis, the needs don’t go away. Once schools reopen, we need to be in a position to move as quickly as possible to resume a sense of normalcy and help those who have fallen behind catch up.

http://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website.

https://hopegiveshope.com

When placing the ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday, the priest will say one of two things: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” or “Repent, and believe in the Gospel”. Ashes both remind us of our own mortality and call us to repentance. The ashes also call us to be humble and remind us of the humility of God expressed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.  The God who created the heavens and the earth, the God who created the universe and everything in it—the stars, black holes, quantum particles, DNA, and time itself—humbled himself to enter into creation to take on our flesh and our sins for our salvation.

In his book “Life of Christ”, Fulton Sheen talks about how hard for us it is to truly understand the humility that was involved in the Word becoming flesh. In the book, he asks you to imagine a human person divesting himself of his body, and then sending his soul into the body of a serpent.  The person would need to accept the limitations of the creature’s body, while all the while knowing that his mind was superior and that fangs could not adequately articulate thoughts no serpent ever possessed. However, even if we can get a glimpse of the humility of God becoming man through this analogy, it is nothing compared to the emptying of God to become one of us.

Jesus lived his entire life with humility: from his birth in a trough from which animals fed until the final emptying of himself on the Cross between two criminals. As St. Paul wrote, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:7-8).

So, what does humility mean in the context our relationship with God? St. Thomas Aquinas defines humility this way: “Humility means seeing ourselves as God sees us: knowing every good we have comes from Him as pure gift” (SummaQ161). Perhaps as a corollary to this, we could also say that humility means that we need to accept and surrender ourselves to the fact that God is God and we are not.

Jesus tells us that we need to be like a little child to enter the kingdom of heaven, that is, to accept the kingdom of God with the humility and trust of a child. We need to accept that we are completely dependent on God and trust that God always does what is best for us. We need to be willing to submit to God’s plan for us, especially when it’s not what we have planned.  We need to accept the fact that there are things we can’t control and that we need God’s help. When we rely more on ourselves than on God, we lose the opportunity God is presenting us to grow closer to him. Jesus asks us to imitate him: “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.” When we imitate Jesus’s humility, we approach the fullness of what it means to be human. We share in the life of Christ when we are humble as he is humble. Humility is the path that Jesus lays out for us to grow in relationship with him.

In one of his letters, St. Augustine writes, “The way to Christ is first through humility, second through humility, third through humility” (Letters 118:22). As we begin this season of lent, let us approach our God in humility and surrender ourselves to him recognizing that everything in our lives and in the world around us is a gift. Let us share in the life of Christ by sharing in his humility. Let us grow closer to Christ by being humble as he is humble.

As I write this, it’s hard to believe that we are beginning the second week of February. The month of January was an absolute blur to me. With the school year in Kenya beginning on January 6, Florah and I spent the last month paying school fees, buying school supplies and getting shoes and uniforms for the students we support in the HOPE project.

You don’t just write out a check to the school and send it in the mail. Every primary school requires cash payments, which means that every school must be visited in person and in some cases the school fees negotiated. Everything in Kenya is a negotiation. This responsibility for primary school payments falls on Florah. As our current set of HOPE students span thirty-seven schools, Florah had to visit every one of them.

While Florah is responsible for primary school payments, I handle secondary and vocational schools. In this respect, my job is much easier. Not only are there less schools to pay, twenty vs. thirty-seven, but secondary schools don’t require school fees to be paid in cash. Rather, each school has a bank account at local bank, which the money must be deposited into. The twenty secondary and vocational schools which our students currently attend have their accounts in seven separate banks. Sounds much easier, right?  Seven banks vs thirty-seven schools. While making payments at the bank is certainly much easier than making payments at thirty-seven different primary schools, it still is not as easy as it appears. Even though the secondary school payments are deposited into a bank account, it is not really possible to pay by check. When you pay for a student, you have to get an individual receipt from the bank for that particular student’s payment. We then give the receipt to the student and the student must then bring the receipt to the school before they can begin classes. If the student can’t produce a receipt, he is sent home. The common alibi that the check is in the mail doesn’t work here. This means that I have to withdraw the cash for the school payments from the bank and then bring cash to each bank to pay into the accounts of the secondary or vocational school for each individual student.  Keep in mind that I do not have a car here and so either have to walk or take very crowded public transportation to get anywhere. I don’t like carrying a lot of money around with me, but sometimes I have no choice. I just don’t do it often. Luckily there is one shopping plaza in Mombasa that has most of the banks I need to make school payments. As with most public places in Kenya, you need to pass through a security checkpoint to enter, which is good for me as once I’m inside, I feel pretty safe walking around from bank to bank. On the negative side, this shopping plaza is not close to where I live and not convenient for me to get to. Luckily, I’m able to get all the first term payments done in a few trips (and will be able to get second and third term payments with just one trip each). I also pay some school fees at banks close to where I live, but as there is no single shopping plaza with all the banks I need, I have to carry the cash with me as I walk from bank to bank, which I try to avoid.

What complicates matters for first term secondary school payments (there are three terms in a school year in Kenya, which runs from the beginning of January until the end of November), is that students who are beginning secondary school (the first year of secondary school is called Form 1) often don’t know until the last minute where they are going to school. Other students don’t know whether they will go to secondary school or vocational school. In Kenya, the fate of a student solely depends on standardized exams. The exam that students take after completing primary school is called the KCPE, which stands for The Kenya Certificate of Primary Education. A student’s score on the KCPE exam will dictate what schools a student will be admitted to. Students take the KCSE at the end of November, but the grades don’t become available until after Christmas. Students express their interest in schools they would like to potentially attend, and once the KCSE exam results are available, a determination will be made as to which school a child will be offered admittance to. Students are then issued Calling Letters which confirm their acceptance into the school, spell out the fee structure for the current academic year, and give a list of all the books and school supplies that a student is required to have. We provide all the required supplies to our HOPE students. However, there are often multiple rounds of placing students in schools as some students may opt to attend a private or other type of school, rather than the government schools (equivalent to a public school in the US) that our HOPE students attend. The schools will then offer open slots to other students. All of this means that paying secondary school fees is a moving target. As much as I want to just get everything done, I have to wait until the dust settles. Actually, I can’t even really wait until the dust settles, but need to pay fees as each student learns his own fate. Because of all this reshuffling, some students will start classes several weeks after the school term has started. However, we want those that are ready, to start classes as soon as they know what secondary school they will be attending. As a result, the fees end up being paid in dribs and drabs.

This also complicates the buying of school uniforms and school supplies as they are specific to each school. In Kenya, all schools require uniforms—both government (public) schools as well as private and religious schools. School uniforms are essentially all the same and differ only in color, with each school having its own combination of colors and sometimes a logo. Typically, school uniforms are custom made by tailors who measure the students and then make the uniforms using the required colors for the school the student will be attending. This is predominantly how students get their school uniforms in Kenya and how we supply uniforms to our HOPE students. Out on the street, you will find many tailors who make custom clothes. As you can image, these tailors are very busy at the beginning of the school year. In January, we paid school fees and provided uniforms and school supplies for 131 students. This includes eleven students who are new to HOPE. 

After having taken a break for the month of December, tutorials are now back in session on Saturdays. Florah handles one location and I run tutorials at the other. Things will remain like this until April when there is a break between the first and second terms. During this three-week period, we will run three tutorials per week. It will also again be time to pay school fees for second term. However, this is a much easier proposition than first term. Perhaps that’s just wishful thinking!

As I stated earlier, it’s hard to believe that January and one week of February are in the rearview mirror. This means that we are a mere three weeks from the beginning of Lent. Wasn’t it just Christmas?

As most Catholics do as Lent approaches, I’ve begun to think about my Lenten resolutions. When most Catholics think of Lenten resolutions, they think of giving something up. However, when giving something up, what we really need to ask ourselves is how does this sacrifice help change me and lead me to grow in my love of God. Sacrifice doesn’t do anything for God or make us any worthier of his love or forgiveness. God already loves us without limit. Jesus has already died for our sins. Forgiveness is ours for the asking as God is infinitely merciful and forgives without keeping score. Rather, I view sacrifice like going to the gym. Sacrifice helps us to build up the muscles we need to do God’s will and resist the temptations that try to pull us off course. Like going to the gym, sacrifice also helps to clear our minds of the 101 important things we can’t stop thinking about and focus on what’s really important. I don’t like fasting at all, but have come to realize what a blessing it can be. Like going to the gym, sacrifices like fasting can only be appreciated after you’ve completed them. Although I used to love going to the gym in the morning, it was sometimes hard to get out of bed. However, I always knew that I would be glad I went to the gym rather than stay in bed once I was finished with my workout. So, I think it is with sacrifice and giving things up. No one likes to do it, but if done with the intent of using it in a way to grow closer to God, we get way more out of it than we put in. What I want to focus on in my Lenten Resolutions is how I can, through the grace that God constantly showers each of one us, prepare myself to receive the risen Christ. I want to shed the things in my life that either leave no room for Christ or prevent me from deepening my love for him.

When I was at IBM (it’s hard to believe that I’ve now been gone sixteen months), I worked in technical sales for most of my career. As with most sales organizations, we had a selling process that included a cost benefit analysis of the solution we were proposing. A cost benefit analysis is a decision-making tool used by pretty much all organizations to determine whether or not to proceed with a major expenditure. It is to determine whether a planned expenditure is “worth the price”. In a cost benefit analysis, you add up all the positive factors that an expenditure is expected to provide and subtract the negative ones. You do this over a certain time horizon, say three years, and include both initial investment costs as well as ongoing costs into the equation. The net result is then used as an input to the decision-making process. The tricky part is quantifying the positive and negative factors and in many cases is as much art as science. However, as long as you document all your assumptions, people can come to their own conclusions as to the validity of the analysis. As the IBM solutions we were trying to convince the customer to buy were major expenditures and so they would need to cost justify the transaction, we were more than happy to provide our input to the cost benefit analysis to “assist” the buyer in the evaluation process.

I got thinking about cost benefit analysis as I saw something recently that referenced the Ford Pinto. The Ford Pinto was a subcompact car that Ford rushed to market in the mid 1960s to address the growing competition of foreign imports. To provide adequate trunk space, a design decision was made to locate the gas tank behind the rear axle of the car. This design left the Pinto highly vulnerable to fires, or worse yet, explosions in the event of a rear-end collision. Although initial crash test analysis performed by Ford indicated there was a problem, Ford was determined to get the car to market and not lose more market share to foreign imports. Reports of the number of deaths due to fuel tank fires resulting from rear end collisions involving the Ford Pinto range anywhere from 27 to 180. As these reports of fuel tank fire related deaths emerged, Ford conducted further crash tests that reaffirmed the danger in the car’s design. However, Ford executives made a conscious decision not to modify the design of the Pinto as in doing so would hurt corporate profits, even though the cost of the fix to retrofit the Pinto was only $11 per vehicle. Ford’s decision was based on a cost benefit analysis. On the positive side of the equation, Ford would save $11 per vehicle by not implementing a fix. On the negative side of the equation, Ford estimated that each victim would cost them $200,000, which is the number they used to estimate the cost of settling victim lawsuits. In other words, Ford put a $200,000 price tag on each human life. The cost benefit analysis concluded that spending $11 per car to fix the faulty design was not cost justified even though their own conservative estimates showed that the current fuel tank design would directly lead to at least five hundred deaths over an eight-year period. When Ford internal documents, which detailed this cost benefit analysis and the fact that many people would die as a result of the fuel tank design become public, the public outcry was enormous.  Fortunately, the Federal government stepped in and ordered a recall. Otherwise the number of people killed as a direct result of the fuel tank design would have been much higher.

The reason I bring up cost benefit analysis is that it got me thinking about how would I fare if God did a cost benefit analysis with me. What if God took this type decision making approach in our relationship? What would the result be if God added up all my positive factors and subtracted all the negative ones? Would the analysis show that I’m “worth it”? What would be the net result? The thought is kind of scary and humbling.

Luckily, we don’t need to worry about any of this. A cost benefit analysis is completely antithetical to how God operates and is completely incompatible with who God is. God is love and his transactional currency is love. Love is willing the good of the one who is loved. Love is not calculating or self-referential. Love does not keep score. Rather, love is the giving of ones very self. God loves us unconditionally. As God is love, he can do nothing other than love. Love is the one thing you can only have if you give it away. And the more you give away, the more you have. How do you put that into a cost benefit analysis?

A few weeks ago, the Gospel for the day was Jesus’s famous parable of the sower who puts down seed on various types of soil. I subscribe to daily Gospel reflections by Bishop Robert Barron. His reflections are short and sweet, but always give me something to think about. However, I was particularly struck by this reflection. As is true for me, Bishop Barron says that most people interpret this parable by focusing on the different types of soil and applying them symbolically to ourselves. However, in the reflection, he suggested that we instead focus our attention on the sower, which he believes is at the heart of what Jesus is teaching. 

In the reflection, we are asked to imagine a crowd of farmers listening to Jesus tell this parable: a man goes out to sow and he throws the seed on the path, on rocky soil, on thorny soil and finally on good soil. The original hearers of this tale would have rolled their eyes at the ridiculousness of this farmer. Who throws seed down on a path, on thorny soil or on rocky soil?

God is like this crazy farmer. He sows the seed of his word and his love not only on the receptive sole, but also on the path, on the rock and on the thorny soil. Our God showers his graces not only on those who will respond, but lavishly pours out his love on those who are least likely to respond. God’s love is irrational, extravagant, embarrassing, unreasonable, completely over the top.

This is our God and I’m sure glad that he is like that crazy farmer. I’m eternally thankful that God doesn’t look at me through the lens of a cost benefit analysis. How blessed are we that God loved us into being? How blessed are we that God wants to share his love with us for all eternity? For our part, all we need to do is accept this undeserved and unwarranted love. As I stated aboe, this is what I’ll be focusing on this lent. How do I empty myself so that can better accept the love of this crazy farmer who so much wants to lavish love on me?

Please consider donating to my HOPE ministry project, which provides educational assistance to orphans and other vulnerable children, particularly those impacted by AIDS, in Mombasa, Kenya. The work we do makes a real and lasting difference in the lives of the children we serve. Your financial support can change the life of a child. The project is self-funded and is completely dependent on the generosity of people who are willing to help.

http://www.mklm.org/RTarro

You can learn more about the HOPE project on our website.

https://hopegiveshope.com

Mungu ni mwema. God is good.