I feel like we have been living Good Friday and Holy Saturday, over and over again since CV19 has hit our lives. Each day we hear a news of another person who has succumbed to the horrific symptoms of CV19 and has gone home to be with the Lord. Each day it gets harder and harder to hear this, as we struggle with not being able to visit our loved ones, say goodbye, or even have a funeral one of the most important events in our Catholic Faith.

To put it simply I am struggling, I am trying to find hope in all of this madness. I come from a very supportive strong family, my parents, siblings and I (not to mention our two pups) have together been through the worst of the worst. While we have family and friends who support us, there is a strength and a bond that is unbroken between us… but now that I can’t touch them, reach them, hug them, how can we help each other?

When something affects my family, times like this, I would normally turn to my church family, I would be sitting with my church mama down at the docks praying through this stress or at my church Grandma’s house for dinner with a big huge pot of sauce, but she’s fighting off CV-19 and we are not allowed to see each other.

We lose another friend, and it starts over again, Good Friday’s death and Holy Saturday’s waiting.

This pandemic is working its way through my community, and I could feel my hope being drained…quicker than it should be. As I write this, I haven’t received in 33 days, and I haven’t gone to confession in 64 days. Which is the longest I have ever gone. This is my fuel in life.

As I wake up each day thinking this is a dream and go to sleep every night praying this nightmare will end, the stress takes over, will I have a job, will I be able to afford my home, my car, my life feels out of control, I have a quiet moment of prayer and I hear, this is how Mary felt… and I sink.

Mary Magdalene is the person who stands out to me the most during Holy Week. Silently supporting Jesus from the sidelines, after he saved her, she follows him. She walks just a few steps behind him while he conducts his ministry. Quietly supportive, learning how to love without any stipulations, unconditionally. He slowly gives her hope and restores her self-worth.  This man who saved her goes from being brought into town on a donkey while people lay palms before him to condemned to death in a matter of days. All while she watched, silently.

On Good Friday, Mary sat weeping at the foot of the cross as the man who loved her unconditionally and gave her so much hope, but most importantly made her feel safe died. He was beaten, ridiculed, and left to hang on a cross like a monster. How could she have any hope after watching this?

I imagine Holy Saturday was the worst for her, she now had time to process everything she saw, the pain in Jesus’ eyes the hurt he felt, but worst of all he was gone. And while we know he rose on Easter and appeared to Mary first, the time in between his death, and when she realized she saw him must have felt like an eternity.

But she had hope. During this time, she knew Jesus was coming back… she just did not know when.

I have learned during this pandemic to be like Mary, to be patient, hopeful and wait. It is a challenge not receiving for me. But like she had Jesus to lead her through a terribly difficult time, we have our Priests who we look to, to lead us through this time.

As like most of us, they have never lived through Covid-19 or a pandemic of this measure, and they are now being looked at to provide guidance to all of us in order to make their parishioners feel spiritually fed, loved, and not alone in all of this. Forced to now minister online, and face it MOST priests do not have internet and tech things in their wheelhouse, they are now preaching to empty pews, alone, and without their staff and parishioners. Yet like Mary followed Jesus, we are following our Priests.

Slowly hope is coming back, slowly, people are rejoining the faith, it is convenience and easier to go to mass. Priests are going out of their way to be present, to love each of us.

Maybe not everything from this pandemic has been awful, we though isolated, have learned that our Church is bigger than a sickness. That we can survive anything, and no matter how many Good Friday’s and Holy Saturday’s we have to live through, he always rises on the last day. So, let us always have hope and look to those that he has chosen to lead us.

And while we are still at home, let us pray that this deep time of prayer will lead to a fruitful future. A time of hope, and gratitude in our church. Our priests need our support right now, so I just ask that as you finish reading my rambling thoughts you offer two prayers up

• For priests everywhere, how lucky are we that we have a little bit of Jesus here on Earth?
• For those who have lost hope, that they see a glimmer of light at the end of this dark tunnel

 

Love and prayers,

Britt