The Master has Need of You

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