As a PS to my entry for this week, I offer this edited piece from this week's Tablet from London. I found it not just supportive but offering a powerful insight into these extraordinary times.
We
must find a new road.
Matthew ends
his story of the Epiphany with the powerful image of the Magi, taking seriously
the warning they had received, deciding to return home by a different road.
With our Epiphany celebrations concluded, we too find ourselves being warned about
the potential calamity we face in this present health emergency if we do not
change course.
Like the
Magi, the Church has found it necessary to take a different road to arrive at
the same destination – a deep union with the Father through Christ, in the
Spirit. The closure of churches has in a surprising way revealed to us new ways
of celebrating and living out our Catholic faith, contributing to the common
good of all. Thanks to social media we
have had livestreamed Masses and prayer meetings, online group meetings and
family chat rooms. In my own parish in
South Lanarkshire in the diocese of Motherwell, I know this has led many to a
deeper experience of God-in-Christ.
Paradoxically,
the physical separation from the church building and from family and community
has opened up for many new ways of prayer and contemplation, together with a
deeper sense of union and communion. Our reliance on others, the readiness to
greet and help strangers, the appreciation of the little things, the wonder at
the beauty of nature, the solitude and silence of the daily walk – these are
small examples of the newness to which we have been exposed and of which Pope
Francis constantly reminds us.
With the
Magi, we feel that things can never be quite the same again, nor should they
be; that an end has happened and we are on the cusp of something new. There is
a feeling that “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we
start from” (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding).
(The
writer continues)
God is not
bound by the sacraments. There have always been Catholics unable to access the
sacraments due to persecution, a shortage of priests, or for other reasons. (We may wish) to return as quickly as
possible to how things were before the pandemic. The rush to try to restore the
“old normal” risks suffocating the new opportunities that are emerging for
Catholics in their spiritual journey, their experience of Church, and their
Christian living.
In the long
Holy Saturday we have found ourselves in over these months, still shrouded in
darkness and unknowing, we are preparing to start afresh. We are doing so not
alone but with Christ at our side, alongside our fellow Catholics and fellow
citizens, waiting, expecting, with trust and hope. We have discovered that we
are being offered in so many different ways that root eucharistic experience of
personal encounter with God in Christ. Although we have been unable to access
the sacraments, the Real Presence of the Lord never abandoned us.
The new
bonds of solidarity and communion we are experiencing with each other, priests
and lay men and women, the whole people of God and the wider society, have
given us some inkling of what synodality, of being “on the road together”,
central to Pope Francis’ vision of the Church, looks and tastes like. It is
this synodality which will offer a broader space and horizon for laity,
priests, and bishops to discern together the new road we must find.
Like the
Magi, if we find the courage and wisdom not to rush to return home by the same
route we came, we will more surely feel the pulse of the Holy Spirit within and
among us, be opened up to divine epiphany, and be filled constantly with
worship and adoration of the Lord.
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