Without the sacraments will our spiritual lives have been weakened…or will we appreciate them more?

To look at this coronavirus spiritually is to see it as a call to conversion, both personally and as the Church, writes Fr John Harris OP

On many occasions over the last few weeks I have been asked where is God in this lockdown and coronavirus crisis. Needless to say from the perspective of official Ireland, God is completely absent. Never in any of the public statements I have heard or read has there been any mention of prayer or God. Indeed, in the new phased reopening of the country, churches have been regulated with museums. I find this very interesting for it seems to point as to how the Church is seen by many in our society – a museum piece, a relic of the past which is kept as a matter of interest to a few.

If my reading of the Government plan is correct one will be able to go to a restaurant, get one’s hair coloured or buy a cow at a mart before one can go into a church for Mass. There has to be a question here for Church-State separation! It has been a long time in Irish history since the civil power felt it could regulate Church services.

But what of the Church herself? For many, the closing of the doors of the churches was a statement. In the April 30 edition of The Irish Catholic, Bishop Donal McKeown challenged us as a Church that while we prioritise peoples’ physical health we must be able to speak a language that goes beyond the economic and the hygienic. The bishop says “if after hearing the Gospel we have nothing to offer but the ‘technocratic imagination…’ then we have nothing to offer”.

Responses

These words need to be considered seriously in any new pastoral responses to this ongoing health crisis and any others which may be part of our social lives moving into the future.

But what of the deeper question – where is God? Has he abandoned us? What is he saying to us as believers? As Christians, we always have to look for God in the situations we find ourselves living through and not outside. The logic of the Incarnation is that God is always to be found within the human story. God in Christ Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit is with us and we seek him in the midst of ours stories no matter how complicated they may be. The Christian always says in Faith: God is with us.

The easiest way we can see Christ present now is for us to see how many people have reacted in love to this crisis. Doctors and nurses have gone back into hospitals and nursing homes, those who have come back to Ireland to work on the front lines. The people who have continued to work in care homes and in supermarkets. People who are living the Gospel in giving. Neighbours and gardai who have knocked on doors of cocooned people, organisations who have organised to help those house bound. For as Christians, we believe where there is true love there is God.

But this crisis asks us to go deeper. The crucifix reassures us that Christ never abandons his people, even in the face of death. Christ is at one with us and united to him life takes on a new meaning. That surely is the story of redemption. Christ becomes one with us and in his offering of himself invites us to give ourselves to him. In this communion our lives are renewed and glorified.

Distraction

This present situation has been seen only as a health crisis and that is okay for the health professionals, but for us believers such a response is inadequate. For us who accept Jesus as Our Lord this is also a moment of spiritual re-awakening. To look at this coronavirus spiritually is to see it as a call to conversion, both personally and as the Church. For us believers, we must endeavour to hear the voice of God in the silence, the lack of entertainment and the lack of distraction. This can also be for us a spiritual and religious moment. A moment for us all to reflect on God in our lives.

Now we have the time to rediscover our families and our neighbour communities we can also reconnect in a new way with God. I must accept it as a time of grace. God is not absent. If we have the ears to hear and the hearts to believe. We have to live beyond the secular and the voices of secularism. God is not in the thunder and the rocks splitting as we discover in the story of the Prophet Elijah but in the simple silence breeze. It is a voice of great power who orders Elijah back to mission and not to feeling sorry for himself. It is a silent voice to action, to true conversion.

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The great writers on the spiritual life have consistently written of periods in the  spiritual life when God seems to withdraw from the affective powers of our souls. There are times when we feel God has abandoned us, when he doesn’t seem to answer our prayers, times we get no good feeling from prayer, we enter into an arid, desert period in our spiritual lives. But the great spiritual writers reassure us that such times are not moments of abandonment but rather moments of growth when we are moving into a new phase of the spiritual life. During these moments of aridity, God is calling us to a deeper love of him in himself and not simply for the gifts he gives us when we are close to Him.

When we gather we are gathering in Christ, head and members, moments for encountering Christ sacramentally in our midst”

We seek now God for himself and not for the anything for ourselves. It is a moment of the growth in love, of deeper conversion. “Come back to me” says the Lord, as a Church and in our personal lives. As a 2nd Century author writes from the Office of Readings Week 32, Saturday: “The Faithful do not reap a quick harvest: they have to wait for it to ripen slowly because if God rewarded them quickly religion would be a career and not worship of God. It would consist in the pursuit of self-interest, not piety”.

This time can be for the Church all over the world a time of refocusing our minds and intentions on God for himself. While the social aspect of our Faith is central to what we are called to as followers of Christ, yet our Christianity can never become just an individual activity (although it is always personal), likewise this social aspect can never become the central reason for our coming together. The Church is not simply a social institution. It is primarily a supernatural reality, and so when we gather we are gathering in Christ, head and members, moments for encountering Christ sacramentally in our midst. As the social aspect of our Faith has been limited during these months, maybe we are being called to refocus how we come together. Are our moments of Faith together moments of the encounter with God?

As an example, celebrating funerals during this time have become very different moments of encounter. They are now much more focused on the death of the person, the family gathered and the offering of the Holy Mass. A lot of the ceremonies which have grown up around the celebrations of funerals have been dispensed with and the Mass has once again become central.

These months can be a time of real refocusing for us as a Church. We are being told by the experts that there is no going back to life before March 2020, there is now going to be a new normal. People are asking will the web camera now become the new normal for attending Mass. Maybe the absence of the real celebration of the Mass each weekend will cause us to look again at how we actually celebrate Sunday, as the Day of the Lord.

The actual celebration and being part of the Eucharistic community is the source of our strength to be Christians in the world of today”

I am reminded of how Pope Benedict XVI spoke in May 2005 of the martyrs of North Africa who gave their lives for celebrating Mass on a Sunday. Presiding at the closing Mass of the 24th Italian National Eucharistic Congress, the Pope spoke in his homily about the group of Christians who were killed in 304 during the persecution of the Roman emperor Diocletian. The theme of the congress was the motto of the martyrs: ‘We Cannot Live without Sunday.’ The emperor, had prohibited Christians, “under pain of death, to possess the Scriptures, to meet on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist and to build premises for their assemblies”.

Abitene

In a small village called Abitene, Tunis of today, 49 Christians, meeting in the home of Octavius Felix, were taken by surprise on a Sunday while celebrating the Eucharist, defying the imperial prohibitions. Arrested, they were taken to Carthage to be interrogated by the proconsul as to why they had violated the emperor’s order, one of the group answered simply: “We cannot live without meeting on Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist. We would not have the strength to face the daily difficulties and not succumb.”

The Pope Emeritus reminded the assembly that “it is not easy for us either to live as Christians” in a world “characterised by rampant consumerism, religious indifference and secularism closed to transcendence.” So the actual celebration and being part of the Eucharistic community is the source of our strength to be Christians in the world of today. Maybe these months without the communal celebration of the Mass can be for us a refocusing of what the Sunday Mass is as the source of our Christian life. Maybe God is calling us back to Mass by our being absent from it.

For us Catholics, our churches are not simply places of assembling, they are places where we go personally to pray and encounter the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament amidst the communion of saints. They are places of worship, sacred places, which invite us to go beyond the immediate and enter into the mystery – a door inviting us to the more rather than the less. As the virus has taken so much of what we thought we could not live without, pubs, cinema, work, travel, entertainment…maybe we are being asked to go deeper to the more.

Many years ago the spiritual writer Max Thurin, one-time monk of Taize wrote: “Every church building must be ‘praying’ even when no liturgical celebrations are taking place there, it must be a place where, in a restless world, one can meet the Lord in peace. The Eucharistic liturgy is an act of thanksgiving, a connection, a memorial and an offering accompanied by intercession, which invite the celebrants and faithful to turn towards the altar of the Lord in an attitude of adoration and contemplation.”

Hopefully during these times, we can discover the place of sacred places in our lives”

Hopefully during these times, we can discover the place of sacred places in our lives, when we go into our churches as doors to heaven in the sense of opening us up to God. Maybe we can learn through this time of desert to say again with St Peter: “Lord to whom shall we go, you have the message of eternal life.”

In St Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks the question: “When the Son of Man comes will he find any faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). Over the last few years I have been reflecting more and more on this question.

As our society has changed so radically over the last decade this question seems so much more real to me.

When this health crisis is over, be it this year or next, if ever, when the new becomes the normal will this have been a time of a deepening of Faith or a weakening. Without the sacraments will our spiritual lives have been weakened or will we appreciate them all the more?

Without the normal, going regularly to church and the sacraments, let us pray that this doesn’t become the new normal.