Yesterday marked my last day of working in Mosses. It was quite a spectacle. Once a month the Good Shepherd Catholic Center runs the Mobile Food Pantry. What this entails: hundreds of people come in cars and drive by a long series of tables with different kinds of foods to bring home to their families. When the truck came in from the food bank it dropped off almost 14,000 pounds of fruits, vegetables, and other healthy items. My goodness! I had never seen so much lettuce in my life! Never mind all the other things. In the end, 197 families went home with about 13,500 pounds of food. The whole process--unloading the food, setting up the tables, getting the food to peoples' cars, and cleaning up took only two and half hours! The sisters really have it down to a science.
In the afternoon, as I drove home, I was talking to Bro. Tom Berube about the whole week and what an experience it was. I told him how you really don't have words to describe what it is like in Mosses. He said, "Words and pictures can never capture the extreme situations there, nor can they capture the happiness and hope of the people. It is only by going there, being and working with the folks that you can understand." That is why Fr. Steve had me go there this week. It is something that has and will continue to shape so many of my worldviews and ideas of ministry for the rest of my life. Who knows what the Lord may bring!
On a different note, for me the hardest thing about the loss of Fr. Mike Jacques is seeing how torn up so many of my brothers are. People, who are always in such high spirits, joking around and working very hard, suddenly break down in the middle of prayer. People, whose lives are such beaming examples of the joy and hope of Christ, become so downcast and even distant. That is the most difficult thing for me, even harder than Mike's passing. It is seeing my brothers, the people I have lived and grown with for the past few years, suffering the pain of losing someone that many of them had known since day one of novitiate back in the 1970s; and knowing all I can do is be there for them. In the end that is all we can do. I don't even know what that means or how it will manifest itself. To paraphrase what C.S Lewis once wrote, if only we could but bear the pain of each other's losses, to take them upon ourselves together, they would still hurt but the blows would be lessened.
Time for some racquetball with Fr. Steve. I'm going to try to crush him today.
No comments:
Post a Comment