Fr Colin McLean with a parishioner after celebrating Mass in Salvador Brazil in 2019. - Photo: Fr Patrick Raleigh
When New Year´s Eve was approaching in the year 1999, many of my parishioners in the city of Salvador, Brazil were concerned that the world would end at midnight on December 31st. Here we are, 23 years later, still kicking! However, 2020 and 2021 saw the end of the normal world as we knew it with one word: COVID-19.
On September 3rd, 2020, I finally left Brazil on the strong advice of my then Regional Director, due to my age and living alone in a country rife with the coronavirus. Unable to celebrate Masses in communities and with our youth social justice theatre project on very limited activities due to restrictions in Salvador, I reluctantly agreed to leave. Most of the goodbyes were painful, since I couldn't hug people goodbye. However, it was made a little easier by the fact that my many friends were all concerned for my welfare, and knew I was leaving them for that reason. It was not me saying goodbye because I was ready to leave them.
One close friend, a nurse, came with a medical smock to one of the small parties organized to say farewell to me, and she told me that, provided I wore a mask and the smock, I could hug people goodbye. I promised to return to Salvador when it was safe to do so. A couple of my good friends, Salvador and Denise Pacheco, a permanent married deacon and his wife, tell me they have a visitor´s room in their house and I can stay there when I visit.
Despite 2020 and 2021 with its restrictions, all has not been gloom and doom in the world. We have seen the emergence of two powerful people´s movements, MeToo and Black Lives Matter, both of which are bringing daily to media and to legal attention sexual harassment and racism, as well as the importance of climate change. Unfortunately, nature continues to show its power via the frequent violent storms and devastating floods across our beloved country Australia.
As a result of the US´s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and other current conflicts, once again we are pulled into the plight of refugees, and remember the vision of a young mother, her protective husband, and their infant son struggling to cross into Egypt from Palestine, fleeing not from the Taliban but from King Herod. Seemingly, they were not detained crossing the border or turned back. They didn’t hear, “We don’t want any more refugees or asylum seekers here,” nor were they quarantined or kept for years in a detention centre.
With these thoughts in mind, may we think of those suffering at this time, and ask the blessings of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, not only on ourselves but on all of humankind, and especially on refugees and asylum seekers.
Columban Fr Colin McLean lives and works in Australia.
Listen to "Ready to leave"
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