Rethinking Mission - in Honduras

Today our parish, Dulce Nombre de María in Dulce Nombre de Copán, Honduras, sent out forty-one members of the parish on a week-long mission, most going out two-by-two, to visit almost all of the fifty-some towns, villages, and hamlets. They were sent at Mass this morning – without cellphones or money. Please pray for them.

I had to rethink “mission” when I came to Honduras I June 2007. I came as a “lay missionary” but quickly had this gently challenged. A Spanish Franciscan sister I had met told me about a Mass every Sunday morning in the neighborhood where I ended up living for more than eight years. A retired priest, now ninety years old and still going strong, presided at the Mass. The first time I went, Sor Inez introduced me as a lay missionary. Padre Fausto, without batting an eye, noted that we are all called to be missionaries. Wow.

Then I read and studied the document that had been issued in May 2007 by the Latin American bishops meeting in Aparecida, Brazil. Central to that document is the call to be missionary disciples. In the very first article they explain why they met and were sending out this message:

We have done so as pastors who want to continue to advance the evangelizing action of the Church, which is called to make all its members disciples and missionaries of Christ, Way, Truth, and Life, so our peoples may have life in Him.

Not surprisingly, the first major writing of Pope Francis echoed this, In paragraph 120 of Evangelii Gudium, The Joy of the Gospel, he wrote:

In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19).

                

This should be no surprise for those who realize that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was on the committee that produced the final document from the Aparecida meeting.

The week of mission that we have had in our parish for the last three years has been an attempt to live this out on the parish level.

For this mission, no outside preacher is brought in. All those involved are members of the parish who give a week of their time for this effort.

They go two by two (or, occasionally, in a group of three) to villages or towns which are far from their homes – living on the generosity of the village which provides them food, a place to sleep, and a guide to visit homes.

Their mission is not to preach. First of all, they are there to listen, to offer a word of comfort or invitation, to be the presence of God by what they do and say. In our training sessions, we have tried to help them develop a spirituality of mission similar to that found in the apostolic exhortations of Pope Francis, with an emphasis on accompanying the people. They are not there to preach at people.

Though we’ve stressed in the last years the importance of visiting the sick, this year we see the mission as reaching out to the estranged – in Spanish, los alejados – so that they can hear words of welcome from the Church.

The missionaries will visit the sick and the elderly, but we hope they will reach out to people estranged from the church or persons who are looked down upon by other members of their communities.

This year we gave each missionary a cross to wear around their neck. It was made locally by a carpenter, based on a cross that I had obtained in New York over a year ago, a cross meant to be held in the palm of the hand. The missionaries will wear this around their neck and when they pray with someone they will take off the cross and place it in the other person’s hand. They were urged to give it to someone on the last day.

As Padre German explained to the missionaries before Mass, the carpenter had made about 100 of them for us last year, at no cost. Each missionary had one and gave it to a sick or bed0ridden person during their week of mission. The carpenter just wanted to keep the original. When the pastor asked him to make some this year, the carpenter pulled that cross out of his pocket. He had carried it and often held it in his hands. It was nearly black, having absorbed the sweat, the oil, and more from his hands.

Bearing the cross, sharing the cross, letting one’s life be absorbed by the cross – that’s a new way of doing mission. Well, not really new – just returning to the roots.