Pastoral
“THAT MOURNS IN LONELY EXILE HERE”
Communication, even across continents, has never been easier. Mobile telephones and e-mails bring the whole world closer together. Travel has become easier; friendships that in the past, gradually faded because of distance should be able to remain strong if we really want them to. More and more people live in large urban complexes where they are rarely far from others. And yet loneliness is probably more common than it has ever been.
Sources of loneliness
Some of this is because we are not deeply in touch with ourselves and are, therefore, frightened of reaching out. An anonymous commentator reflected sadly: “It’s so lonely here when you don’t even know yourself!” It is tempting to remain in unthreatened isolation rather than to take the risk of knowing and being known.
Some loneliness is because, like the disciples on the road, we are lost in our own troubles. They were so wrapped up in their misery that they were not open to what the Stranger was telling them; they were “foolish and slow of heart to believe” the news that was to reunite the downcast followers of Christ in jubilant communion. We have only to listen to daytime radio to know that many people travel the road of life feeling that nobody is willing to understand them or to help them. They feel put upon, isolated, misunderstood and ill-treated. They have nobody to turn to other than a supportive radio presenter and an eavesdropping nation, which may or may not be sympathetic.
Some loneliness is because, among all the thousands of people with whom we come in contact, there are few enough whom we really know. Most of those we meet are, and will remain, people about whose family life, anxieties, hopes and sorrows we know little or nothing.
We ‘know’ people through the news, although, in reality, we know hardly anything about them as real people. That is why we can look at a person’s life falling apart – whether we think they brought it on themselves or not – with remarkably little compassion. We denounce them, dismiss them or deride them in a way that we could never do if we really knew their personal weaknesses, struggles, pains, hopes and sorrows – or if we ever thought about their families. A self-righteous, uncaring reaction to people in trouble, people we do not really know, people who ‘mean nothing to us’, tells us something uncomfortable about the society we live in – and what we may expect should we or a member of our family be in such a position.
Some loneliness is because the great bustle of modern life often means that when a person really needs a friend there is nobody who sees it as his or her responsibility to reach out to them. Someone summed up the motto of today’s world: “Remember, we are all in this alone”. (20)
The foundation of all social life and of all belonging, the family, is often less able than in the past to provide the sense of secure belonging that we need. This can be the case for many reasons, because we as a society do not give support of family life the priority it should have, because of the mobility which separates young adults from parents and grandparents from grandchildren, because of pressures on particular families, because of the pace of modern living, and, sadly, because of the tragedy of marriage break-up.
The causes and kinds of loneliness are varied. The fact is, however, that there is loneliness in all of us. The other side of the search for meaning is the search to belong. Belonging is part of what we are. We are made to belong to a community greater than we have ever experienced or imagined and we are, therefore, always lonely. Our true homeland is in heaven ( Phil 3:20 ) and we are in exile.
Made in and for relationship
At the very beginning of our lives we were invited into a relationship with God. From the beginning we were also invited into human relationships. In the womb, before we became conscious of ourselves, we were already known, and hopefully being welcomed, as a son or daughter, a brother or sister. In a good family we learn to know ourselves; we learn to relate with others; we learn to communicate; we acquire the sense of being loved, which calls us to love in return and to extend that love to the wider community. And yet, there is an incompleteness and fragility about even the closest and deepest relationships. Everything that we rely on is threatened by death; even the most ardent love can go sour; even the most faithful loyalty can be betrayed. That uncertainty intensifies the longing for a belonging that is beyond impermanence and failure.
At the dawn of creation God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” ( Gen 2:18 ). We come to know ourselves only through our interaction with others. “(Human beings) can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving” (21). The ache of loneliness arises because we are made for communion, for companionship (which literally means, sharing bread together).
We belong to the family of God. It is no accident that we refer to the Blessed Eucharist as ‘Holy Communion’: “At each Holy Mass we are called to measure ourselves against the ideal of communion which the Acts of the Apostles paints as a model for the Church in every age” (22).
Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet and it was distributed to each as any had need ( Acts 4:32-35 ).
When we receive him in Holy Communion, we receive what we are; we are the Body of Christ:
To that which you are, you respond: 'Amen', and by responding to it you assent to it. For you hear the words 'The Body of Christ,' and respond 'Amen.' Be then a member of the Body of Christ that your Amen may be true (23).
We receive the Body and Blood of Jesus who both eases and intensifies our deepest hunger. We receive him together. In other words, we recognise that we are travelling the same road, with the same emptiness, the same questions, the same hope, the same needs and the same gratitude. It follows that each of has an obligation to be ready and anxious to help carry the pain and the struggle of the other. There was not a needy person among the first Christians. To live as Christ’s Body means, “making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all and through all and in all” ( Eph 4:3-6 ). When the Holy Father said that at each Mass we must measure ourselves against the ideal of communion described in the Acts of the Apostles, he was issuing an endlessly demanding challenge. In a Christian community nobody should feel marginalized or isolated, nobody should leave the Sunday liturgy feeling friendless and isolated.
The priest who presides at the celebration of the Eucharist has been ordained to represent Christ, the Head of the Body. He is, of course, a brother with all who have been baptised( 24), in need of God’s mercy, fragile and flawed, like every other member of the community, needing their prayers and support, experiencing like them the emptiness which God promises to fill. But he is also a sign of the truth that this community is not created out of its own limited human resources and talents; it is built on the one foundation, Jesus Christ ( I Cor 3:11, Eph 2:20 ). We are Christ’s Body; already we have begun to be part of a community which is flawless and eternal. The presence of Christ the Head guarantees that. The presence of the priest, acting ‘in the person of Christ’ the Head, makes us a Eucharistic community (25).
The decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood is a call to each parish and cluster to ask itself whether their Christian community is one that actively prays for vocations. The parish also needs to ask itself whether it provides an environment in which a young man would be encouraged to consider a vocation to the priesthood and would be supported in following it.
We are already at the point where not every parish can have a full time, resident priest. It is already evident that over the next decade this situation will disimprove, since when new candidates come forward it will take several years before we could hope to see them being ordained. One fruit of the Year of the Eucharist should be a greater urgency in every parish about praying for and encouraging vocations to the priesthood.
The whole human family
The Church does not exist simply for its own sake, but is “a sacrament – a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race” (26). Our desire to belong goes far beyond our own family, our own parish. Our desire is for a sense of belonging that embraces the whole human family. The Church is a sign and instrument of that universal unity.
The disaster in South East Asia prompted an extraordinarily generous response. Seeing those dreadful scenes and hearing the unimaginable numbers of casualties, we recognised that brothers and sisters of ours were facing horrors too awful for words. We knew that the human race is one family and that our response to the weakest and most helpless of Christ’s brothers and sisters is a response to him (27).
Our need to belong is a longing for a fullness that stretches our minds to breaking point. Our gathering around the table of the Eucharist will have its completion when the fullness of God’s peace is revealed. We will be gathered around the throne of God, brothers and sisters of Christ from every time and place, “people of every race, language and way of life to share in the one eternal banquet” (28).
The great variety of individual gifts, languages, histories, cultures and achievements will no longer be a cause of envy, rivalry, suspicion or misunderstanding. We will rejoice in all “the fruits of our nature and our enterprise” and we will “find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom” (29). We will see in each of those people a unique image of our God. We will rejoice in each gift and each good fruit as if it were our own:
Eternal life consists in the joyful companionship of all the blessed, a companionship which is full of delight; since each one will possess all good things together with all the blessed, for they will all love one another as themselves, and, therefore, will rejoice in one another’s happiness as if it were their own, and consequently the joy and gladness of one will be as great as the joy of all (30).
That is the universal, eternal companionship for which we are made and for which we long. The Eucharist is a celebration of that union between humanity and God and that complete companionship among human beings:
The Eucharist is truly a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth. It is a glorious ray of the heavenly Jerusalem which pierces the clouds of our history and lights up our journey (31).
Learning to welcome one another
The early Church understood hospitality as a fundamental Christian virtue. It was the characteristic of the Christian community to welcome strangers and to offer them friendship and respect.
When we gather to celebrate the Eucharist we should be asking ourselves whether this is a welcoming community – for those who are strangers in our country, for those who have been away from the Church for some time, for young people, for people of different backgrounds. The words of St James are uncompromising:
If a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say ‘Have a seat here, please,’ while to the other who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’ or ‘Sit at my feet’, have you not made distinctions among yourselves and made yourselves judges with evil thoughts… If you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors ( James 2:2-9 ).
A welcome – or its opposite – can often be conveyed in small ways, a smile, a kind word, a gesture – or their absence. When the King in Matthew 25 acknowledges those who welcomed him in strangers and condemns those who failed to welcome him, both groups are astonished ( Mt 25:38, 44 ).
The Eucharist speaks to the yearning to belong, to the sense of ‘lonely exile’. We can, however, obscure the meaning of the welcoming presence of the Lord if a parish does not, as the Pope exhorted, rediscover its vocation to be a fraternal and welcoming family home, where those who have been baptised and confirmed become aware of forming the People of God. In that home, the bread of good doctrine and the Eucharistic Bread are broken for them in abundance, in the setting of the one act of worship; from that home they are sent out day by day to their apostolic mission in all the centres of activity of the life of the world (32).
The Eucharist is a foretaste of the glorious communion of the human family with God – God’s people ‘mourn in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear’. It follows that our celebration demands of us that we seek to foreshadow the unity and peace to which all of us are called. Pope John Paul said this to the participants in the Eucharistic Congress in Lourdes in 1981:
The Congress has taught you to live the breaking of bread as Church, according to all its demands: welcoming, exchanging, sharing, going beyond barriers, being concerned for the conversion of people, the renunciation of prejudices, the transforming of our social milieu in structures and in spirit. You have understood that to be true and logical your meeting at the eucharistic table must have practical consequences (33).
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