Mass with God's Children

Attending Mass each day is one of the graces that we, as seminarians, get to receive.  Mass allows us to encounter Christ in his passion repeatedly, and each mass provides an opportunity to experience the beauties of our Catholic faith.  On the Epiphany, many of us attended mass at Daya Dan.  Daya Dan is a home for mentally and physically handicapped children from the ages of about 4-17 years of age, and it is run by the Missionaries of Charity.  I was able to encounter Christ in a special way during this mass since children, especially those who have disabilities, are able to worship so purely.  From a worldly view this mass was chaos, and yet from a spiritual viewpoint this mass was… still chaos. 

However, the chaos was beautiful and innocent.  Pure worship, no duplicity of heart.  Each child responded to all the mass parts, yet each at different times and different variations of tone and volume (much of the volume was at or below audibility).  They couldn’t help themselves, they were so excited that all they could do was worship with all they had.  During the homily, the priest asked questions and beckoned for alleluias in order to keep the attention of the children.  They knew almost all the answers to the questions, as if they had practiced or studied beforehand (some of the questions were pretty tough questions that many adults probably couldn’t answer).  The “alleluias” resounded all about the tiny chapel.  One of the altar servers stood abruptly and, with hands raised to the sky, screamed “alleluia” to the heavens over and over until his excitement receded back to a level which was controllable.

All of us volunteers had smiles strung across our faces as we were filled with joy.  This is a type of worship that many of us are unable to perform, for we live lives that are complicated and clouded by the world.  These children are simple hearted and free, which allows them to worship with such purity.  It is easy to think that we have come here with something to offer a people who are poor and suffering, but the truth is that we ourselves are so deeply poor and on our own we have nothing to offer.  This mass, and in particular the worship of the pure hearted, has showed me that it is only through the love and mercy of Jesus that we have anything to offer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Leper Colony

Image
Some Patients at the Colony               These first few days in Kolkata have been going well. I don’t think that I have waved so much in my entire life! Here it’s as if we are celebrities. People will come up to us and want to take pictures with us. There will be many times where we are in the bus and it will come to a stop. The people in the bus across from us will make eye contact and you can tell that they are intrigued to see you. Some of them will wave and if they don’t then when you wave to them you are met with a prompt wave and smile. There was one instance, we were coming back from our boat trip on the Ganges River. While we were waiting for the bus there was a truck with probably fifty people in the back. They were all very excited to see us and they were waving and smiling. Then as the bus drove away they continued to wave and I wanted to see how far they would go until they stopped waving. As long as I kept waving they waved back an...
Read more

Meeting the Superior General of the MC's

Image
The last part of our mission trip across the world was a very special meeting. Our group had the honor of having a private encounter with Sr. Mary Prema, who is the current superior general of the Missionaries of Charity, which means that she is in charge of all Missionaries of Charity (over 5,000!) in the entire world. I can’t imagine that it is easy being a successor of a saint! She surely has very big (or should I say very little?) shoes to fill. We had the meeting in the mother house of the order in a humble room next to the tomb of Mother Teresa. Even though she recently arrived from a very long trip, she had a very humble, yet motherly patience, gentleness, and subtle joy – true marks of a Missionary of Charity. She was very happy to learn that we were well on our way to the priesthood, and we had the opportunity to absorb some of her words of wisdom and encouragement. She started off by reminding us that none of our experiences in Kolkata are supposed to end. Rather, w...
Read more

Jan Seva ("Serving the People") School Visit

Image
               Thursday we went to a school for under privileged children.  Most of the children live in shack homes in the slums of the city.  The kids' school day began with an assembly where all the kids sing the their national anthem.  It was an appropriate introduction to the kids to hear them all sing-screaming at the top of their lungs.               After the assembly we got to play with the kids at recess and the two best words to describe what recess is like with these kids are adorable and chaotic.  Just picture about 60 little Indian kids running around, screaming, in a playground that is only about 50 square feet, add a few teeter-totters and slides and sprinkle in a couple of giant yoga balls and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what we were getting into.  Needless to say it was a blast.        ...
Read more