Deacon Kyle Eller: Bringing the Paschal Mystery to people still walking in pandemic darkness

Mere Catholicism 

Poking around for a TV series I’d never watched that I could stream, I recently found one I liked. A short way in, though, I came across an episode that originally aired in 2005, which was about a disease outbreak, and I was surprised to discover how “triggering” it was for me. The language, the public policy thought process, and so on were all too reminiscent of recent real-life events. These scenarios had a vastly different entertainment value for me as a “what-if,” fictional scenario than they do now. 

Sometimes as I’m preparing for Mass and making sure everyone and everything is in its place, my mind will flash back to the weeks when it was only my pastor and me at Mass, and only he received Communion. I think about the surreal Easter Vigil and Chrism Mass I assisted at in those dark days with only a handful of other clergy, praying for all the people who wanted to be there but couldn’t be. 

For similar reasons, several times over the past couple of years I have been preparing a homily and thought of an excellent illustration of something drawn from our collective Covid experience — but then decided to leave it out. Not only am I sure most people are as tired of the very word “Covid” as I am, I also feared strong feelings still radiating from those difficult days would drown out whatever point I was actually trying to make. 

But maybe it’s time to revisit it, precisely because of the ways it’s still affecting us, still hurting us. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, seemed to think so. In late June, he wrote a column asking of himself and the church more broadly, basically, “How did we do?” He had in mind the difficult decisions about meeting pressing pastoral needs, especially pastoral care and the sacraments for those who were sick and dying. 

Those are definitely questions worth asking. Throughout the pandemic, I argued that people in positions of responsibility, both civil leaders and church leaders, had a really tough job. The decisions they made had life-and-death consequences, and they were working amid a great deal of genuine uncertainty and stress. I thought then and think now that they deserved the benefit of a whole lot of doubts, whether I agreed with them or not. Now that much of that strain has lifted, perhaps it’s wise to look back on those decisions with clearer eyes and learn from mistakes without undue casting of blame. 

But what I have in mind is more fundamental than that. I was talking with one of my brother clergy recently about a particularly acute situation where addiction and similar issues have brought deep hurts, and he remarked that we aren’t anywhere close to fully grasping the wounds people are still suffering from the pandemic and the lockdowns and all the rest of it. 

He was, of course, absolutely right. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could deny it. Even before the pandemic hit we were talking about “deaths of despair.” In the wake of it, all those problems seem to have magnified dramatically. 

In recent months, I heard another church leader, in a quasi-private setting, inviting an “examination of conscience” for the church in the wake of the pandemic, but with a different emphasis. I confess I found myself very convicted by it. He noted that he was disturbed during the pandemic at how poorly the church offered hope to people. As Catholics, we carry at our very core the Paschal Mystery of Jesus — his suffering, death, and resurrection — and with it the truth that even in the midst of darkness and death, with every cross, there is a day of resurrection and new life coming. Despair does not have the last word. We, of all people, should know this and live this. We should have been offering it to people. They needed what we have. It was an evangelizing moment. And too often we missed it. 

Again, this seems to me almost indisputably right. 

So perhaps it’s worth noticing that the “evangelizing moment” isn’t fully over. People are still suffering. People are still angry, still bitter, still divided, still nursing grudges, still simply coming to terms with what they had to go through and how they feel about it and what it did to them. 

Our temptation is to fall back on what we’ve been doing these past years, the very things that haven’t worked, the very things that have brought us to where we are. I notice that these things are often the opposite of the things the Gospel calls us to do. 

What if, instead of needing to justify ourselves, we instead humbled ourselves and admitted, at least to ourselves and to God, where we might have been wrong? What if, instead of judging harshly those we disagree with and trying to see the worst in them, we judged gently and mercifully and tried to put the best construction on things? 

What if, instead of holding on to anger and bitterness toward those we believe have wronged us, we tried forgiveness and mercy even to people who don’t deserve it and may never ask for it? What if we opened ourselves to the possibility, in God’s time, of even being reconciled to them? 

What if, instead of fighting tooth and nail to right some earthly wrong, we trusted God in his justice to sort things out in his time and in his way? 

What if, instead of assigning blame, we instead sought the healing and hope that only Jesus can bring, opening our hearts and our wounds to him with trust that he can accomplish far more than we can ask or imagine? 

The evangelizing moment is still with us. People still need the hope that God can bring. 

Deacon Kyle Eller is editor of The Northern Cross. Reach him at [email protected].