THE ISOLATION CAN BE VERY CRUEL

               

   Our aged father died a month ago (very close to 96 years of age). He had been living in a senior’s care home for the last number of years. With the pandemic the program of isolation was imposed immediately in mid-March. We did not get to see him for eleven weeks. On the weekend he was failing rapidly the family were called in. I spent a little time with him on the Sunday evening, prayed and anointed him with the sacrament of the sick, and then returned to Saskatoon. We were not allowed to spend an extended period of time with him which was practiced right up to the imposition of isolation. 

 

As I drove away from the care home it was so clear to me, “But this is so cruel!”

 

As a society we work very hard to protect people, and the isolation of the vulnerable and those physically compromised are the elderly. But there is another side to this. What is beneficial to our physical well-being can be so harmful to our emotional well-being, our mental health.

 

When your family cannot be present to your last hours and/or days of your life, when they cannot share in your final breath on this earth, something is very wrong here. People are telling us how much of a emptiness they feel inside their lives because they could not be present at our father or mother’s final moments on this earth.

 

The absence of family indicates what is the deepest need of a human being: to have the people who love us close to us. We want to train people when they object that “Mom doesn’t know any of us anymore,” we affirm that it is probably more important that you be present to her in her dementia. She can sense of your presence and your love. She may not be able to speak your name at this point in her life but she can sense your presence!

 

When people reach the stage where they need to be cared for in a senior’s home, they have already lost a great number of their friends and relatives. The only people left to spend time with them is their family. Our presence (often in silence) is crucial. It is more important than when we could chatter about so many mundane things.

 

To use a Biblical image: happy the eighty-five year old who has family that cares and makes the effort to visit. Cursed be the family who deliberately absents themselves from these significant moments of care. One of our parishioners, who helped his wife with dementia with her lunch and supper for three and a half years (he never missed one day) shared a very painful story. “There was one family that I only saw them come and visit only on Christmas day.” Could life be so empty?

 

Our adult children are learning from us. How we treat our aging parents is how they will treat us. As one wise caregiver cautioned: “Remember, your children are watching you.”

 

Although many families are feeling the pain of their absence at the passing of their aged parents we are being brought to a deeper awareness of how important our love and friendship actually is in life.  Some of the best moments may have been the time you held your aged mother’s hand, and she did not recognize you, but you knew you loved and you knew you cared! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE GOOD THAT CAN COME FROM BLACK LIVES MATTER

   

There are events that happen in the world which ignite protest and strong feelings from people and cultures that are very distant to the people who were actually involved in the historical event. 

It was May 25 of this year, in Minneapolis, USA, when a black man, George Floyd, was the victim of a horrendous crime – and all this was recorded and broadcast to all the world. After almost ten weeks we have not seen the end of the protests that have hit the streets of so many of our cities, worldwide.

Some Catholics have called for an official teaching on racism, like a papal encyclical (clear Church policy) to be issued. I know the concern that is expressing this but this is not something that we need at this point in time. 

These protests challenge us (i.e., believers) to dig into the recent roots of Church teaching with regard to racism and relations between differing minorities. Everything is already in place. We only have to discover it (most often for the first time)

One of the strong features of a church that has bishops is that you have an authorative voice that must responsibly speak the truth of our faith. The statements that our bishops make are carefully prepared and evaluated. Not only does the Pope speak authoritatively, but the conferences of bishops within each country also speak with authority. Our task is the search for the teachings on racism and apply them to our own spiritual lives. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, but rather, we must do the homework of working with the bishops towards the truth about race relations.

Almost immediately, there will be people who try to block this dialogue by claiming that “black lives matter” or “aboriginal lives matter” is a political issue. The churches have no business dealing with political matters! By pushing the question into the political arena such people are effectively neutering the matter.

Race and race relations are always a deeply spiritual matter. How we treat people of different color from ourselves is tied up directly with our service of God. For every Christian this is a very intense question of what we actually believe and how we structure our lives. 

Be realistic on this one!

Even though we may have clear teachings on how we are to value and treat people who are different from the majority, it does not mean we actually put this into practice. The criticism is honestly thrown towards Christians, that their faith is mostly lived on stage (it is a performance), and often, is not rooted in real life (in the trenches).

We will have people upset in our churches over this issue. Strong feelings, fear and anger will explode from time to time but that does not allow us to back away from the issue of race relations (how do we treat each other in his society?). Do not let anyone off the hook, that is, believer and indifferent person. How are you actually living our conviction of faith that all people are created in the image of God and have equal human dignity?

I firmly believe that out of this struggle in Church and society, all these protests, all these heavy discussions that greater good will come out of this. 

WE WILL GET SMALLER

                                               

 

The future for organized religion in our society does not look promising. We will be closing more and more of our church doors as the older generation fades into the sunset. We are realizing a huge culture shift. North Americans and Europeans are moving away from participation and trust in institutions. Participation in church life is one of the first things to go but it is also lessening commitment to family life. 

 

We are experiencing a narrowing of life to the individual. Life is becoming more and more a little monad with little connection and commitment to any other group beyond myself and the people that are meaningful to me. 

 

As we see almost all the volunteer groups disappear, the service organizations being buoyed up by members well past the seventy year best before date, and our traditional faith communities shrink, we can see that we are moving more and more into a very lonely society.

 

The large media are interested in the churches only if there is controversy or scandal. Their disinterest indicates what church communities actually mean to our society. The very few items of reporting indicate how irrelevant churches are to the society.

 

This could make your day go completely flat. It is so depressing!

 

But maybe being pushed into irrelevancy in our society is the season when new fire can emerge from these decaying embers.

 

Christianity started out very small, not only were we seen as irrelevant but we were illegal. This was a group that was politically incorrect; Christians staunchly proclaimed that Christ was Lord (i.e., the divine one) and Cesar was not (he was only a human being). Talk about going against the grain! No wonder Christians became the object of persecutions early on within the Roman Empire.

 

Being reduced can also be our great moment of rebirth. This will force us to focus on what our Church is all about. 

 

As the early Church welcomed the poor and the dispossessed, we too must open our hearts to the many lonely and forgotten people in our society. The local parish must work hard to become a community that people want to belong to and participate in. Can we move to being a community of belonging and away from the religious service station?

 

The strongest service that the Church can offer is the “meaning for life.” We are people who live in a much larger world than the individual. We live with the transcendent and root peoples’ lives in a God who wants so much more from us and calls us to an everlasting life.

 

The pagans of long ago observed very quickly how the Christians took care of one another. We must move more and more into being a Church of service and compassion. This may be very difficult when we live in a society that is so mobile and so involved in doing our own thing. Rebirth can be very painful, but do not all processes to new life involve pain, suffering and some confusion?

 

Small can mean a more meaningful and purposeful life as a faith community. What appears as a disaster may be the moment that we will be forced to arise from the ashes of past glory and power to a new life of service and community. 

 

CHURCH IS IN THE PEOPLE

I have listened to what people appreciate and remember about the weddings they attend. They seldom speak of the dress, the decorations, the food served or the music played. What they remember and clearly appreciate is the way they were treated. They will remember ‘the Bride’s parents welcomed us,’ ‘the groom showed such appreciation for his grandparents,’ and “the family were very hospitable all around.” It is the people that count. 

 

This is how we must understand Christianity. Our religious faith is not first of all a bunch of religious duties and obligations. It is all about the people being transformed into Jesus Christ. The mystery of salvation must be manifested in the lives of the ordinary believers.

 

This does not push aside all the powerful tools we have in the Church but it puts things in perspective. Everything in the Church is meant to serve and nourish the transformation of the believers. We have such strong tools at our disposal. We have a clear doctrinal statement of what the faith consists of (i.e., the Catechism of the Catholic Church); we have a leadership that protects, supports and on many occasions challenges the believer to live their faith in a realistic manner. We have seven official sacraments. The Canon Law of the Church outlines a map for us to function and work together as a worldwide church. 

 

All of these are not ends in themselves. They are means to promote the goal of the Christian life, that is, the transformation of the people to become the living extension of Jesus Christ. What happened in the life of Jesus must now happen in the lives of our people and our parish community in the here and now.

 

With this blog I want to share my reflections and questions on this journey of faith. On this side of the grave we will never have it all made. The life of faith is a real pilgrimage. We set out to find the fullness of God, to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Our life is a quest to come into the fullness of the life and person of Jesus Christ. This is the meaning of eternal life. We are already sharing in the life of the Trinity here on earth but we are walking toward completion, that is, life in God for all eternity. 

 

The Church is not credible and worthwhile only by itself. It is the lives of the believers (their personal witness) that makes Christianity worthwhile.

 

I think of Bryan, who worked hard after he was retired from his administrative position on one of our large corporation, to reach out to refugees, bring them to re-establish their family in Canada, and befriend them in the first several years of their Canadian life. He made the love of God so believable by his commitment to the poor of this world.

 

I think of Doug, who had suffered brain injury as a young man, who took upon himself the task of welcoming everyone to Sunday Mass with a beautiful smile and his ever-present hand-shake. He shared the gift of welcoming that everyone looked forward to receiving every Sunday.

 

Church and faith; it is in the people. I want to be a disciple of Jesus because of what I see in the lives of my fellow believers. There is a bottom line to being Church and it is Christ living and working in the lives of the people.

THE DRUG EPIDEMIC IN CANADA

We live in very dangerous times. We live in a culture that is very accepting of recreational drug use. We are also very affluent and can afford to purchase street drugs at very inflated prices. Parents (many who have a history of recreational drug use spanning their younger days) worry that they might lose one of their adult children through an overdose. The fear is very real. At the same time, they acknowledge that they cannot do anything about the possibility that their son or daughter might hit a bad dose and be gone. The child they raised with such care could evaporate into one of the nameless statistics of overdoses in Canada.

 

Compounded this epidemic is the arrival and abuse of prescription pain killers that has gripped North America during the past six years. Many men, suffering severe pain from an accident, have been prescribed opioids, which unfortunately developed into a severe addiction. 

 

This time around the drugs are synthetic. You do not need to import drugs from some far away country. You can manufacture the drugs (fentanyl and crystal meth as some of the most common street drugs) in your own garage – and cheaply!

 

When you put the numbers of overdoses in Canada at around 4500 in 2018 you conclude that everyone is just one family away from an overdose. Drug addiction covers every occupation, ethnic background, religious and cultural background. Also, very frightening is the fact that almost all these deaths are accidental (people who overdose do not set out to die). Eighty percent of overdose deaths are men who die alone.

 

During the shutdown and isolation caused by the coronavirus the Province of British Columbia recorded 170 suspected toxicity deaths in the month of May, 2020. This comes to 5.5 deaths per day. The isolation has caused a 93% increased in overdose deaths over the same month, May of 2019. The numbers shout out at us.

 

Too many Canadians are just dropping their hands in helplessness. They do not know how to control the drugs. And they are rendered helpless when they recognize that the drug used or the addicted are ingesting the drugs themselves.People shrug their shoulders: no one is forcing them to take these drugs.

As a Church we may not have any of the answers to this problem but we will not back away. Pope Francis has challenged the Church to have dirt on our feet from being out in the streets with the people. We walk with them in their struggles. 

                                                                                                           

We admit our powerlessness to defeat this mountainous problem but we care, support and walk with those parents who are trying everything to get their addicted adults into treatment. We care about the parent who honestly confess that they did not know their son was a user. (Most often these adults live and work in a different city from their parents).

 

lost sheep that Jesus taught us may be the thirty-four year old accountant, who  is working a very responsible position with his accounting firm. Even if he overdoses he is still someone’s son, brother, friend and fellow human being. 

 

As a Church we hold the pain of the addicted individual, his family, all his friends in our hearts. Not only do we pray for them but we want to be with his family in compassion and understanding.