One of the loud clashes that we see in our Catholic Church is to see media coverage of Pope Francis leading the liturgy in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Here you have this huge opulent building (one of the great structures on the globe) that surrounds the church leader who consciously wants to be a bishop for the poor of this world. He challenges the people of the Church not to look for support in their buildings, their power or their competence. Rather he calls the Church to be a ‘field hospital;’ a Church for the poor by the poor.
We have yet to come to grips with this incredible challenge. This is definitely directing to Church to make a sharp right turn. Lift your eyes from doing churchy things and care for the poor beginning in your own country.
In our faith communities (the local parish community of believers) we need to turn our attention towards the wounded and the push-aside ones.
In our faith communities we need to work to become more aware of the wounds that people carry in their lives. They come in all their woundedness to the Lord.
There is the wounds of divorce and disjointed families. When a marriage breaks up there are all kinds of feelings of failure and fear of joining the praying community. There are wounds between parents and children, and between the children. One of the painful wounds that divorced people will tell you is that they do not feel that the Church is a very welcoming place.
Then there are the parents and siblings who live in fear that one of their brothers (a drug user) might accidently overdose on bad drugs. In 2021 it is so dangerous out there! The fentanyl epidemic is a silent killer because all the national attention is turned towards the covid epidemic. These parents may never articulate their fears but they will tremble if the phone rings at 9:00am on a weekend morning to inform them of the overdose death of their son (it is mostly males who die of an overdose in Canada). The long-lasting wounds of an overdose death is so real in the lives of too many of our parents.
The unemployed and the people who are on the verge of collapsing the businesses they worked so hard to establish have the wounds of failure and uselessness. Who wants to have a thirty-four year old male banging around the house day after day and often for months because there is no job! The struggles that the unemployed go through do not receive sufficient reflection in society at large, but also in our Churches. What are their wounds?
Whenever our Church gathers on Sunday there are always people who have lost loved ones. Death is a walking companion to every human being. We have a strong spiritual accompaniment to those who have died, but there are deep feelings of loss and loneliness in those who have loved them. If we live long enough (into the mid-nineties) we will have lost all our friends and co-workers. We might only have grandchildren that are still attached to us. The wounds brought on by the death of our loved ones is very real.
Each faith community is challenged when we embrace the woundedness of our people. Each person/family/relationship must come before the wounded Christ and ask for healing and support. This is such a good time for the Church. We may be very slow to take up the challenge of Pope Francis to become a ‘field hospital’ but he has set us on the right path.
When you can join your faith community again, do a ‘spiritual search’ for the woundedness among us. You will engage in prayer immediately.
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