cry out to God!

On Thursday evening I recieved a beautiful e-mail from a parishioner and a daily communicant expressing her great love and desire to be fed with the Eucharist. She continued on in anger at me because I refuse to fed her and other starving sheep. She said, “If the markets and restaurants have devised plans to feed people following government mandates surely the Church could do so as well.”

I share her anguish. It is hard for me as a pastor to not be able to celebrate the sacraments. Today’s responsorial Psalm (18) says, “In my distress I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice.” This person is obviously in distress. I am in distress, we are all in distress, is the Lord hearing our voices? I’d like to answer this parishioner on two levels and in all honesty I am speaking to myself as much to her.

The Eucharist is a meal, where we come together as the Body of Christ to share a meal. We are not a restaurant where we come to place our order and pick up our food. It is important to remember that over 2000 people come to receive the Eucharist here at St. Mary’s every Sunday, 150 every day. If it was simply a matter of distributing hosts we could certainly do that. Priests could wear hazmat suits, people could drive up in their cars and we could hand out hosts with six foot poles. People could place their orders on line and we could have the hosts all prepared in individual sanitary receptacles.

That would not be the Eucharist, that would be the McEucharist. For Catholic Christians, and this is why this distancing is so much harder for us than others, the Eucharist is about community. It is about gathering together the faithful, worshipping our God together and being nourished by his Body and Blood together.

We can feed our sheep, we just cannot do it with the celebration of the Sacraments at this time. Here at St. Mary’s we are live streaming our masses, and the Rosary. We have begun to call all of our parishioners by phone praying together with them. We are sending out e-mail blasts, letters, encouraging and showing people how they can pray at home.

Yes, this is a time of great suffering. We are not able to celebrate the Eucharist. In Los Angeles over 4000 people have gotten sick, 89 have died. One million people in the world have the virus a ¼ of which live in the United States. We are called to make untold sacrifices. Like Jesus we are called to make sacrifices that others might live.

We are about to begin Holy Week, our Holiest week of the year. The week we commemorate the institution of the Eucharist and the Priesthood. This week we are called to make huge sacrifices, we make this sacrifice like Jesus did, we make it so others might live.

These days it seems that the scripture was written for today; that the Holy Writers had us in mind during this pandemic.  Like the Psalmist we feel…

The breakers of death surged round about me,
the destroying floods overwhelmed me;
The cords of the nether world enmeshed me,
the snares of death overtook me.

So what are we to do?

In our distress we call upon the LORD
and cry out to God;
From his temple he hears our voice,
and our cry reaches his ears.

In our fear we call out to God. We believe that our prayer reaches God’s ears.