Deacon Greg offers hope to Haiti and reminds us of our Christian obligation:
This Sunday, in churches across the country, there will be special collections for Haiti. You have seen the pictures. You’ve read the stories. I don’t need to tell you how desperate the situation is. This is a moment when all of us are called upon to go beyond ourselves: to love the neighbor we do not know….to bind his wounds…to dry her tears.
We can do that with donations, of course. Millions have already given by text messages and credit cards. But we can also do it with something people often forget in this secular age.
We can do it with prayer.
If we do nothing else, we need to pray for the people of Haiti. Pray for the lost, the orphaned, the widowed, the helpless. Pray for the mother who was on CNN the other night. She lost all five of her children, and her family could only hold her while she screamed. Pray for the students who were killed at the seminary. Pray for the rescue workers who are facing a new nightmare every day – without power, without water, surrounded every hour of every day by the sounds and smells of death.
But pray as well that — through our sacrifice, and our prayer, and the good works of so many people around the world — Haiti may be transformed once more. The glorious words from Isaiah in today’s readings offer this consolation for a suffering world:
“No more shall people call you “Forsaken, ”
or your land “Desolate, ”
but you shall be called “My Delight, ”
and your land “Espoused.”What was water…will become wine.
My mind goes back to the image Archbishop Dolan mentioned — the Pieta, a grieving mother holding in her arms her dead child. And I think of all the parents in Haiti who are doing that this week, and all who will do it in the days to come.
Yet: even in that most intense sorrow, the grief of Our Lady of Sorrows, cradling her child in her arms, we find hope. And we hold on to that hope for the people of Haiti.
Because despite everything, our faith assures us of this:
That the agony at the foot of the cross was not the end of the story.
There is, still to come, a resurrection.
Crossposted(*).
