Grace: I beg for the grace of being able to enter into the joy and consolation of Jesus as he savors the victory of his risen life. (Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, 221)
In a forum on the situation in Myanmar last November, a local development worker shared with us the story of a Myanmar mother who lost her son in a military bombing of their village. The worker showed a poignant picture of the mother walking behind her dead son’s body during a funeral entourage. The mother was desperately looking for a place to bury her son. They had to keep moving from one village to another due to the relentless bombing of villages and the refusal of some villages to accept the burial of someone not from their village due to customary practices. Thankfully, one village finally accepted her son’s burial.
We were deeply shocked by the situation. The local aid worker went on to narrate that for development workers like her, the situation was getting riskier due to the increasing military harassment and threats to their lives. United Nations workers were leaving due to the grave dangers in fear for their lives. When asked why she remained and continued to work despite the dangers, she soberly said, “If I left who would take care of her people?” She went on to say that it was her faith that she desperately held on to give her courage and hope amid all the dangers and seeming hopelessness of the situation.
These stories from Myanmar and other areas of conflict and war in Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Israel, Sudan, and Haiti continue to haunt us who long to see peace and human progress in our deeply troubled world. We long to make a difference in addressing the longstanding and intractable problems of poverty and deprivation, forced migration, climate change, impunity of dictators, human trafficking, and many more. For people in the margins like the Myanmar mother and development workers, where will their hope lie? For the young people of Myanmar who are now being compulsorily conscripted into the military to fight their people, where will they find hope? There are no easy answers.
As I reflected on the situation of Myanmar and similar situations of seeming hopelessness, I recalled a beautiful article by James Hanvey on Holy Saturday entitled, “Waiting to Cross Over.” He says that Holy Saturday is not a day in-between between Good Friday and Easter Sunday without any value of its own. It is a day that resists all of our attempts to understand it, but nonetheless, we must ‘live in the realities of Holy Saturday’. In the article, he says,
“Only in the silence of Holy Saturday can we see the true terror of the cross. It exposes the ultimate source of the secular gods’ power – the god of this world, the god of despair; the god who can crucify God… If we have the courage to place our ear to the silence of Holy Saturday we will hear a savage laughter. It is the gods of this world laughing at our hope for a Saviour.”
He goes on to say, “If we can stay in this strange and desolate place waiting, our spiritual eyes become accustomed to this other dimension. We will begin to discern that it has brought us to a way that only Christ has opened up. In the very waiting and living in our own powerlessness, we have already faced the terror of the instruments, the torture, the primal fear that laid its claim upon us. If only we can stay there waiting we will begin to understand that this silence and emptiness is not God’s powerlessness, (not) his death – but his Sabbath: it is an end; it is a completion and it is also a new beginning. It is truly a ‘holy’ Saturday, not an interlude but a hallowing of all of our times of waiting. Without it we would never see into the depths of Good Friday or adjust our understanding to grasp the magnitude and meaning of Easter morning.”
We, all of us, are mostly in the time of Holy Saturday in our lives, in the here and not yet of our salvation. The work of salvation has been completed in the definitive act of Jesus’ death and resurrection. And yet, we know that our salvation in Jesus Christ is still being worked out in our lives as we commit ourselves to live the death and resurrection of Jesus in our daily lives.
Let me end by sharing with you a quote from Pope Francis in his opening address to the Jesuits of the General Congregation 36 when he told them: ask persistently for consolation. He says,
“In the Exercises, Ignatius asks his companions to contemplate “the task of consolation” as something specific to the Resurrected Christ. (Spiritual Exercises, 224) It is the specific task of the Society to console the Christian faithful and to help them in their discernment so that the enemy of human nature does not distract us from joy: the joy of evangelizing, the joy of the family, the joy of the Church, the joy of creation… Let us never be robbed of that joy, neither through discouragement when faced with the great measure of evil in the world and misunderstandings among those who intend to do good, nor let it be replaced with vain joys that are easily bought and sold in any shop.”
As we face our world badly marred by the dark forces of sin, hatred, and division, we are invited at Easter to beg for the grace to enter into the joy and consolation of the Risen Jesus. We are reminded that it is not a joy we can obtain through sheer human will or effort. It is a gift that can only come when we allow God to make real his Son’s passion and death in our lives through walking with and committing ourselves to our suffering sisters and brothers at the margins. Only by being moved with compassion and remaining faithful to our mission can we also share in Jesus’ triumph over sin and death and enter into his joy and consolation.
+AMDG+
Fr Jun Viray SJ