Nuala O’Loan
Respondents in the Diocese of Ferns expressed that it had become increasingly difficult to be Catholic in such a secular country. 
The View
Before I sat down to write this article on Easter Sunday evening, I went for a long walk. It was a cold dry evening and the sun was setting. As I walked along the roads near my home I observed the houses, all shut up, the cars parked, the roads quiet. A few, but very few, like me were out for a walk. All was still and calm. Spring is well under way and as Martin Luther wrote: “The Lord has written the promise of the Resurrection on every leaf in springtime.” I could see that promise all around me.
As I contemplated the fact that no matter what time I walk each day, it is the same, it seems to me and, I am sure, many of you, that the world has stopped. Suddenly, and without any real warning, the world as we knew it, with all its bustle and chaos, has stopped. The coronavirus (Covid-19) is out there, invisible, but creating chaos of its own, destroying lives, and in its wake leaving grief and uncertainty.
We know that this will come to an end, but when it does what kind of a people will we be? Will we be changed? Will these strange days, when so many have walked their own individual ways of the Cross make us different?
Having just witnessed again the deep sadness, the glory and mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus, will we have come to a different place, a different understanding of why we are here, of what God wants from us, of what he is calling each of us to do?
Inexplicable
It is all so inexplicable. We know that shops, cafés and leisure centres are shut; trains hardly travel across the land; there are few planes in the sky. The consequences of this, even over a few weeks, could be devastating. Our inability to spend a few hours shopping, has meant that billions of pounds worth of orders have been cancelled. Goods made in countries like Bangladesh and Vietnam are temporarily not required. That means that the people who make those goods will lose their income. What poverty is going to follow for those who rely on us for their hard-earned livelihood?
The cancelled flights and the virus mean that hotels and leisure faculties across the world are unable to open, leaving tourist industries which frequently operate in a fairly uncertain climate, facing even more uncertainty.
All most of us can do, and do with a grateful heart, is to pray for them”
At this strange time, sections of our people are working to keep our little worlds moving. Food is still being produced, we can get access to medication, to fuel, to books and bicycles…even though, for some of us, the world has stopped, there are those who are working hard to feed us and keep us informed, to move necessary goods and most of all to care for our vulnerable, our isolated and our sick.
Those who get up everyday and go into work on the coronavirus front, in our hospitals and care homes, who know the risk they are taking and who increasingly live away from their families to protect them, are showing amazing courage and resilience. All most of us can do, and do with a grateful heart, is to pray for them, to keep the rules designed to prevent the spread of this disease, and to thank them for their bravery, their selflessness.
It is almost inevitable that we will have re-learned things – that we can survive without constantly running from this to that, and that those whom we love really are so very precious to us. Not being able to see children, parents, siblings, even when they live only 20 or 30 miles away makes us even more aware of how important they and their well-being are to us.
Out walking or running or cycling, we learn to watch for each other and make space for each other on the road. Will we carry that awareness into the future? Will we watch as attentively for those around us? We have, to a much greater degree, that most precious of things: time. How we use it at this time is important. It is a time of stripping away the unnecessary and focusing on the essential, and at the heart of the essential is God.
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Quite often I am invited to go and speak in churches and other places about Faith and life, and I have often said that I cannot imagine a world without the Eucharist. Never did I think that I would know such a world. Now I live in it and, like so many of you I suspect, I find it so very hard. Things I had taken for granted – the opportunity to go to Mass, to join with others in worship, to rejoice in the real presence of the Lord have all been taken away. It will only be for a short time.
Many of our priests are becoming very active, broadcasting Mass, the Stations of the Cross, the Rosary and other moments of prayer on the internet so that we can join them, and even see the inside of our loved and empty churches. For the energy and the care that has gone into all that we thank them so much: you can see the gratitude from the comments that pop up. It has even seemed to me that their virtual congregations are hugely larger than when all was normal.
So I have a question for each of my readers. When these days are past, and your life becomes gradually ‘normal’ again, how will you have changed? Will your priorities be different? Will you. like me, acknowledge the need to hear and respond to that call to “be still and know that I am God.”
May we remember what we have learned during these strange days”
As we look at clearer skies, lower levels of pollution, will we contemplate our use of the world’s resources, as Pope Francis asked us to, in Laudate Si’? As we contemplate our individual responses to the calls for help which have emerged from those who have less than we do, those who cannot do what they want to do, those who are lonely and isolated, will we resolve to live differently in the future?
As the Jesuit priest poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” He went on:
“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod,
“And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
“And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
“Is bare now, nor can foot feel being shod.
“But for all this, nature is never spent;
“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;…
“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
“World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”
When our lives go back to normal, when we can go to Mass again, when life gets busy again, may we remember what we have learned during these strange days and may we always know that, as we learn again every Easter, we are called to eternal life, not just life here on earth.
May we have the courage and the grace to live again as we really should.
