Every year during Holy Week, two large groups of Fijian youth set out to walk across the principle Fijian island, Viti Levu, from east to west. Each group carries a large heavy wooden cross and plan to meet up on Good Friday at the Archdiocesan Retreat Centre near Nadi. Every year Columbans walk with the youth. In this article Fr Patrick Colgan shares with us the experience during Holy Week 2012, when the youth pilgrims had to carry the cross through areas recently devastated by two cyclones followed by two floods. 
During Holy Week I had the privilege once again of joining the 100 Fijian youth who carried a heavy cross 200km around the northern side of the Island to Nadi.
We carried it down the potholed, sizzling hot and (this year) flooded roads of Fiji to the Archdiocesan Retreat Centre near Fiji’s international airport in Nadi.
All the elements of previous years were present, the blisters, the laughter, the tears, the sweaty nights on classroom and hall floors, but this year the floods which devastated the Western Division of the country twice brought an added poignancy and grief to the experience.
Two places, one a Catholic parish and the other a Methodist village, who have traditionally received the walkers for the night, could not do so this year.
In the first case, it was due to having no electricity and piped water. In the second case, there was total devastation caused by trees and mud.
In another parish, the walkers arrived to find the hall full of stranded flood evacuees so the youth had to sleep on concrete verandahs and in the church.
Hearing of their plight, there were frantic phone calls going on between the traditional chiefs of the province, all of them Methodist, trying to arrange alternative halls, schools or anywhere for the youth with their precious ‘cargo’ to stay, and with little notice, provide meals, water and a community to receive them.
Miraculously (there is no other word), places were found, new friendships were forged and the Cross reached the Retreat Centre on time for Good Friday.
For the other youth group walking around the southern side of the island with their own cross and scheduled to meet at the Retreat Centre on the same day, it was even worse.
They were stranded for four days in a village (in which there were yet again no Catholics) while the waters receded and plans had to keep changing as to accommodation, food and whether they could even continue. But continue they did, at the end, not walking, but ‘running’ the Cross to the Retreat Centre.
The scientific mind might consider all this to have been foolish and even dangerously risky, but the walkers themselves saw it as a demonstration of God’s power that they reached their destination on time and brought the symbol of God’s suffering love to places and people so most acutely living it.
My own small contribution to the walk, apart from ‘being there’, were the requests for Confessions constantly coming at me on the road, off the road, in the dark, in the light...as well as the small meditation I was able to share about the part of Jesus’ Passion where he was alone with Pilate. It is not really clear if Jesus, despite appearances, is really the one on trial, or whether it is Pilate/the Jews/Peter/you and me, who are the people who have to answer Pilate’s haunting question: ‘The truth, what is that?’ (Jn 18:38).
The young people of Cross Walk 2012 have certainly shaken up my idea of the ‘truth.’ Apparently, it is not as simple as listening to weather forecasts.
Fr Pat Colgan has worked as a missionary priest in Fiji for many years. At the Columban General Assembly last year, he was elected to the General Council of the Missionary Society of St Columban that is based in Hong Kong.
Read more from The Far East, March 2013
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LISTEN TO: 200km walk for Holy Week (Duration: 5.28mins, MP3, 2.5MB) |