During these past two weeks for the First Reading at daily Mass we’ve been hearing passages from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. While the Church is a reality that looms large in the consciousness of St. Paul (one has only to think of the imagery of the Church as the Body of Christ in 1 Corinthians), the Letter to the Ephesians is a particularly ecclesial epistle. In the second chapter we find the image of the Church as a spiritual structure in which God dwells in the Spirit.
Just following that, though, Paul says something the import of which somehow never stuck me until I read it last week. He refers to “the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you” (3:2). The implications of that line are enormous. It implies that God entrusted to St. Paul grace that he in turn was to distribute to others. This is a form of “mediation” if you will that has sacramental significance. And it’s not surprising that this understanding is expressed elsewhere in the writings of St. Paul and the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 4:1, Paul refers to himself again as “a steward,” but this time “of the mysteries of God.” The early Christians referred to the Sacraments as “the mysteries,” a practice that eastern Christians preserve to this day. And, of course, Jesus Himself made use of the image of a steward in His parables to underscore the sense of responsibility to both Him and their fellow servants with which His apostles must carry out their ministry in His absence, as we heard recently at Mass in the passage from Luke 12:41-48.
Apart from the doctrinal and sacramental conclusions that can be drawn from these passages, which are by no means trivial, they convey a very serious sense of personal responsibility. The grace which we have received, we have received to share with others. I believe that refers to “grace” in the broadest sense of the concept, that is every “gift” we have received, we have received to share with others. In Christianity there is no room for absolute “private property,” whether spiritual or material. Every gift, every blessing, every grace, every benefit we have received, we have received not just for ourselves, but for others, too. Perhaps this is a consciousness that we can strive to cultivate and put into practice during this Pauline Year: the stewardship of grace.
The Law of Labor - To Labor in Love
“[I]n toil shall you eat… all the days of your life… In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Gn 3:17,19).
I turned to those words of Genesis this week as I was wrestling with and reflecting on several somewhat disturbing experiences I had this past week with respect to toil and labor: that of others, not my own.
On one occasion I struck up a little conversation with a man, who with two of his younger brothers was helping to cut down the high grass and clear the compound where we live. His name is Henry; he speaks English well, which means he’s been educated; he and his brothers are from a village a two days walk from Torit. Like many Sudanese he is tall and very dark. Also like many Sudanese he is thin, too thin. His sleek black skin clings very tightly to his taut muscles. When I asked him why he was working so far from home, he replied that the children of his village are hungry and there’s not enough food there for them. Bats and bush rats feed on their crops, not leaving enough for the villagers. So, they cut bamboo and carry it a two days journey on foot to sell in Torit, and do any work there they can find to help feed their families.
A day or two later I wandered over into the large field circumscribed by the ruins of the cathedral and priests house, and a few other buildings that are being repaired and one that is newly built. It, too, is being cleared and prepared for the Diocese of Torit’s Silver Jubilee celebration that will take place on December 8th. The Diocese was given a large amount of food from the Government of South Sudan, who had in turn received it from the World Food Program. The supplies were given to be used in “work-for-food” type activities. And so, every morning at 7:00 am for the past several weeks about a hundred people, mostly women, have shown up to chop grass and otherwise clear the ground. In the early afternoon (because it’s too hot to do heavy work after about 1:00 pm) they are given the portion of sorghum they earned by their labor that day. On that particular day, I noticed a woman, bent over and working hard, with a small child held closely to her back with a cloth wrapped around the woman’s upper body. This is how women typically carry their babies here. What struck me in this case was not only the intensity of the woman’s labor and sweat, but even more so the fact that the baby’s face was badly scarred, probably from having crawled or rolled near a fire and being burned.
Finally, a day or two ago in the late afternoon I walked behind one of the buildings on the “cathedral green,” only to find two Ugandan men busily making adobe mud blocks from soil they had broken up with hoes and moistened with water from a nearby well. It was late afternoon and they had obviously been working all day. They can make two bricks at a time, and turn out several hundred a day. They will be used in some of the structures that will be built for the jubilee celebration.
Work, labor is an essential component of human life. Even before the words cited above were spoken by God to Adam and Eve after the fall, they had been commanded to collaborate in God’s work of creation by filling the earth and subduing it (Gn 1:28). Reflecting on my own struggles and the example of the daily struggle for survival of the Sudanese, I began to see even the words cited above in a different light, more in terms of a remedy than a punishment. One of the effects of original sin is the tendency to inertia and atrophy. Those things with which we struggle help us to keep moving forward, and not become too comfortable. However, there is almost a quantum leap between the struggles of my daily life (and those of most people in the developed world) and the harsh toil of the Sudanese; the contrast is dramatically disproportionate. While most people in the US and Europe struggle too little in a comfort-oriented, entertainment-based culture, the people of Southern Sudan are compelled to have to labor way too hard and way much too much just to survive.
Perhaps the solution to this grave inequality is for those of us whose life is relatively easy to apply more vigorously the remedy for original sin prescribed by God in the verses of Genesis cited above. Perhaps if we work a little more, a little harder on behalf of our disadvantaged brothers and sisters, some of the people I describe above, and countless others like them, will be able to work a little less and rest a little more.
Last Thursday evening at the weekly prayer meeting, Stephen Lugwana, a Ugandan working in evangelization outreach here, was exhorting those present to break out of their comfort zones to reach others with the love of Jesus. What could that possibly mean, I thought, for these people who seem to have so little comfort and so much hardship? The more important question, though, is what could it possibly mean for me?
Going with the Flow
This week we’ve had some heavy rains in Torit. On one evening in particular there was a torrential downpour, something like buckets and cats and dogs combined (raining buckets of cats and dogs?). The rain caused some minor flooding, including in the rooms of several of the priests downtown where the water came almost up to their knees and soaked some of their books and personal belongings. Another man we picked up along the way had dropped his cell phone in the water, causing it to malfunction. What amazed me about these experiences, though, was the way that those affected took it in stride. They weren’t angry or bent out of shape (although they were probably disappointed by what happened), instead they took it in stride as a part of life. What a difference to the way I often respond to frustrating situations of much lesser significance.
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